Superficiality in the WastelandThe Waste Land focuses on the "disillusionment of a generation." The poem was written in the early 1920s, a time of abject poverty, growing unemployment, and much unresolved devastation since the end of World War I in 1918. Despite this, or because of it, people made a conscientious effort to have fun. In doing so, they lost their orientation, their beliefs and their individuality. They were victims of the class system which maintained a system of privilege, snobbery and distrust. Advances in machinery brought new products to market, such as cars, but people were so disillusioned by the social unrest caused by four years of war that even the glamor of new possessions could not fill the spiritual and emotional void left by war. The conscience of a nation has been subjected to the horrors of World War I and people now live as a shell of what once was life. People went through the motions of life, but they did not simply experience a mechanical existence. This type of surface existence, the inability to see beyond the obvious, is represented throughout the Wasteland. The Wasteland is a soulless image of a world deprived of fertility. Everything has become barren in this barren landscape, people have no choice but to look outward because the inside is emotionally dead. As a result, the characters in The Wasteland are superficial in every sense of the word. Some people are obsessed with appearance. Others are so detached from the things that make life more than just breathing and looking good, that they perpetuate the destructive cycle that is slowly killing them and their world. They exist without hope, without faith, and without spiritual enlightenment...... middle of paper ...... if it could bring life to the Wasteland, then there would be hope. Water of course becomes the symbol of faith. Eliot's message is this: if we had faith, the world would begin to take root again. Eliot suggests that our superficiality should be replaced by “Datta...Dayadhvam..Dumyata” “to give, to sympathize, to control”. Our superficial nature has left us in an uncontrollable, unfriendly and nasty wasteland. In short, superficiality is depicted throughout The Wasteland. Those who inhabit this earth exist without faith and reject enlightenment because they care too much about appearances, money, and other unimportant matters, to the point that they have lost the ability to recognize what is necessary. to make life better. 'You don't know anything? Don't you see anything? Do you remember anything?Works Cited: Eliot, TS The Waste Land and Other Poems. Harcourt Brace & Company: New York, 1958.