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T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland Essay

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T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland

Cooperation is the key to human survival, and over time humans have been known to group together to survive. This strategy has allowed humans to develop massive cities and countries of immense power. Without the natural instinct to cling to one another, humans would not be as advanced as they are today, and may not have even made it out of the caves. Many authors display our natural instinct to cooperate in their works, allowing the characters to become more real to the readers.

T.S Eliot’s The Wasteland displays our natural instinct to cooperate with each other as a key to our survival. As we struggle to survive when our world begins to fall apart, our basic instinct to cooperate with each other kicks in …show more content…

This clearly describes how our instinct to cooperate is stronger than any opposition whether it be love or hate.

Love is one of the strongest bonds that keep any number of humans together. This bond, combined with our natural instinct to cooperate with each other is the strongest by far one of the strongest bonds that almost nothing can break. Love stories can be one of the most complicated to describe, and once two people establish the bond of love the need to cooperate with each other no matter what falls apart in the relationship can never be broken. Ha Jin depicts a story very similar to this in his novel Waiting.

In Waiting, Lin Kong falls in love with Manna Wu while in the Chinese Army away from his wife Shuyu. Since adultery is considered very dishonarable in their culture, they are forced to hide their feelings until Kong can get a divorce with Shuyu. The problem comes when Shuyu refuses to settle the divorce and he is forced to wait 18 years by law to get the divorce without her consent. Kong and Wu’s relationship struggles over those years, and against all odds, they cling together and survive. But, the years end up changing them drastically and now their relationship doesn’t seem to be the same. The instinct to cooperate and cling together is too strong for them so even when things fall apart in their relationship they stick together (Jin).

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