Jos Andrs Aldana Santillana

Literature VI
Thursday from 17:00 to 19:00 hrs
MTRA. Broad Bald Charlotte Anne
The Speakers in "The Waste Land Section II: A Game of Chess"
In "The Waste Land" by T.S. Eliot I believe it is not possible to talk about one speaker
throughout the whole poem. For that reason, I will discuss only about the speakers in the
section "A Game of Chess". This section can be divided into two parts, the first one is
regarding a lady in a luxurious place that starts a conversation with herself, and the second
one is concerning a discussion that two women are having in a bar about marriage and
sexuality, while being interrupted by the barkeeper. Together with this division, the
discussions that happen inside each segment happen, as I stated, with two different voices.
Thanks to the title we can become aware of the similarity to a game of chess, because of
the correspondence of players, time and numbers.
The first part of "A Game of Chess" starts with the narrator describing the place in which
the lady is sitting. This place appears to be a room in a mansion because of the
ornamentation, such as "The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne", also the "perfumes"
and "unguents" give the appearance of being from a high social class. The woman then,
starts a conversation with herself talking one after the other, this relates us back to the game
of chess as the lady and her inner voice could be thought of as "chess players". This idea of

being a game of chess is reinforced at the end with "And we shall play a game of chess, /
Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door".
The second part begins with the conversation between two women. Their social class is
lower than the lady in the first section as the setting is in a bar. One of the ladies is trying to
convince her friend to take care of herself because her future husband has been demobbed
and is coming back. The other woman answers with no interest at all for her husband.
Meanwhile the barkeeper keeps reminding that the bar is going to close and that they have
to hurry up. Returning to the idea of the game of chess in the second part as there are
different points of view, one in favor of marriage and one against it, we can relate them to
the two "players". Also as the section finishes, just as a game of chess the time runs out and
like the clock that the players have to click faster, the barkeeper repeats more often
"HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME".
The parallelisms inside "A Game of Chess" not only appears in the two voices in each one
of the divisions, but also in the social class, the first being high and the second low. It is
interesting how the first section looks broken like in a chess opening when the players start
to move the pieces and at the second section when we have a clearer meter like when the
game of chess advances and some pieces have been eliminated, the board looks more
organized. Also the number of lines in the first division are similar to the number of squares
in a chess board (sixty four) and the number of lines in the second division are similar to
the total number of pieces for both sides (thirty two).