Preludes AO5

• Preludes 'critiques the superficiality and pretensions of urban squalor reducing individuals to nothing more than objects' 


  Chakraborty
• Preludes shows the 'utter hollowness and disenchantment of a war-engulfed modern life' 


  Chakraborty
• Preludes explores the problem of the 'structured external life which does not seem to be real' and the internal life of 'fragmentary glimpses that resist formulation' 


  Southam
• The references to time in Preludes 'captures the cyclic monotony' and the imagery of decay 'expose a world falling apart' 


  Chakraborty
• In Preludes, 'Man's life is reduced to a kind of vacuum' 


  Chakraborty
• Preludes 'merges the internal experience with that of the external world'

  Chakraborty
• In Preludes, the images of cooking smells and shuttered rooms implies 'an ache, a yearning, after significance while significance is withheld'


  Mays
• The laugh in Preludes is 'an acceptance of the futility of life and an inability to halt time'
• Eliot's speakers are 'attracted to the empty and discarded, because it resembles how they feel' 


  Howarth