Defective Senses in Eliots The Cocktail Party Essay -- Eliot The Cock

Defective Senses in Eliots The Cocktail Party T.S. Eliots play The Cocktail Party, among each its banal or peculiar occurrences, is laced with images of defective senses and perception, particularly of mound. The maw of reality and illusion confounds the main characters, and their attempts to escape drive the plot. Within vanadium lines of the plays beginning we are confronted with defective senses You take upnt been listening, (p. 9) complains Alex to the confused Julia when she asks about the tigers in his story. Julia exhibits other confused faculty, that of taste at first she claims Whats that? Potato crisps? No, I barely cant endure them, (p. 15), but later says The potato crisps were really excellent (p. 21). in brief she adds sight to the list I must have left my specs hither, / And I simply cant see a thing without them.... / Im afraid I dont remember the colour, / But Id know them, because one lens is missing (p. 33). take down with her glasses, Julias sight go f orth be impaired. And the glasses turn out to have been in her handbag all along. Yet Julias glasses, though often lost, finished their very existence allow her to see better. The spectacles may indeed be a symbol for the plays theme of blindness, but for Julia they provide an plea to see more -- to spy on her companions, as she admits when she says Left anything? Oh, you entertain my spectacles. / No, theyre here. Besides, theyre no use to me. / Im not coming back again this change surface (p. 86). The other characters of Eliots play all exhibit their own failings of perception. Alex finds no mangoes or curry powder in Edwards kitchen, only eggs -- no exotic or intense tastes, only the bland and prosaic. Alex says of his egg concoction that ... ...cent oblivion may remember the vision they have had (p. 139) -- but is vision here an apparition or a way of seeing? Do those who hash over from Celias discovery abandon a dream, or an entire sense? Reilly claims the crawl in t o normal life I could describe in familiar basis / Because you have seen it, as we all have seen it (p. 141), but, if Celia presses on, the destination cannot be described.... You will journey blind (p. 141) -- our normal senses fail us, for we need some higher(prenominal) perception. An illusion or mirage is a failure of vision, so what of vision and psyche existence, whose illusion Celia has pierced? Such higher senses, perhaps, belong to the Guardians of Eliots half-hidden mythos. True sight may be granted only through travel on the way of illumination (p. 147). Works CitedEliot, T.S.,The Cocktail Party, Faber and Faber, 1950.