The modern crisis of authority revolves around the recognition that current versions of traditional authority are no longer credible or reliable. Such a dramatic shift in perception cannot be effectively accomplished in the confident and florid writing of La Belle Epoch. When Franz Kafka and TS Eliot write about the modern crisis of authority, they communicate the idea through the very structure and nature of their new and disturbing writing styles. The crisis is, to borrow a Freudian term, sublimated in the very essence of the works; that is, manifest doubt and insecurity of content result in an uncertain and insecure writing style. To be sure, Kafka and Eliot both explicitly present a crisis of authority in “The Metamorphosis,” “The Waste Land,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Kafka's belligerent Mr. Samsa illustrates the current decadence of authority figures, while Gregor's metamorphosis undermines the authority of the self. Eliot's pseudo-prophets (such as Tiresias, Madame Sosostris, and Prufrock himself) present the collapse of truth and wisdom. Yet behind these characters, beneath the anxiety and manifest crisis of the content, lies a stronger stylistic anxiety, and a more powerful compositional crisis, which accentuate the anguish of the works. Specifically, Kafka's use of perspective and Eliot's use of structure transform the crisis of authority already present in the texts into a crisis of style, thus sublimating this uncertainty into the very nature of the works. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Before examining the style of Kafka and Eliot's works, it is important to establish the presence of a crisis of authority in these works. Both Kafka and Eliot dramatize this decay of authority through the denigration of some achetypically authoritative characters. In Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor's father, as paterfamilias, embodies the authority of the family; as a uniformed bank messenger, he embodies the authority of business and, as an old soldier, the authority of the state. In the first part, Gregor notices "a photograph of [his father] during his military service, as a lieutenant, hand on his sword, a carefree smile on his face, inviting you to respect his uniform and his military bearing" (Kafka 101). Note how Kafka specifically points to uniform and bearing as icons of respect, that is, of authority. In the third part, Mr. Samsa's [bank] uniform, which was not brand new to begin with, began to look dirty... and Gregor often spent whole evenings looking at the numerous greasy stains on the suit... where the old man sat sleeping in extreme discomfort" (123). Thus, as the story progresses, the two icons of authority, uniform and posture, have decayed into filth and discomfort. The downfall of uniform is a powerful example of Mr2E Samsa's decline as an authority figure. In Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Wasteland", the decline of authority is manifested in the decadence of modern prophets. for example, Madame Sosostris, the tarot reader, an aspiring prophetess who “is known to be the wisest woman in Europe” (Eliot, “The Wasteland,” 43, 45). drowned Phoenician" in line 47 and the "death by water" in line 55, come true in Part IV, "Death by water", when Phleba the Phoenician sailor drowns. Yet this prophetess is a ridiculous fake: Eliot belittles her with "Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyant, had a bad cold" (43-44), thus imbuing her with a certain over-earthly banality. Although her accurate tarot reading establishes her as an authority on truth, it does notcan be taken seriously. In "Prufrock" we see a similar rejection of the truth: If a magic lantern projected nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth it If one... were to say, "It's not this at all, it's not that at all what I meant." ("Prufrock", 7-8). Prufrock, already shocked by the difficulty of communication, imagines a magical screen that, with complete accuracy and completeness, would communicate the truth; yet, he reflects, such absolute truth would still be rejected. Likewise, he wonders, Would it have been worth it after all... To say, 'I am Lazarus, returned from the dead, Returning to tell you all, I will tell you all' If one... were to say, "It's not that at all that's what I meant. It's not that at all." Here the prophecy of life after death, along with the promised description of such an afterlife, is rejected. In all these examples, we see the authority of truth and prophecy not only fallen, but completely rejected, ignored and eliminated. Therefore, through such refusal, the crisis of authority is visibly present in the content of Eliot's works. Here it becomes crucial to examine another crisis of authority present in Kafka's story, that of Gregor himself, and the self-alienation from which he suffers. . Simply put, Gregor loses authority over himself, his body and his mind. The most obvious place to start is Gregor's initial transformation: he loses his human form and becomes a monstrous parasite. No explanation is offered, nor any hope for improvement. Such a strong and terrifying image of self-estrangement emphasizes Gregor's loss of control quite effectively. As he tries to get out of bed, he is frustrated by the "numerous little legs that never stop flailing in all directions and which he cannot control in the slightest" (Kafka 92). Gregor's inability to control his legs reflects a general loss of authority over his body. Likewise, when he reflexively snaps his jaw in his mother's face at the sight of coffee, or when he "senselessly" crawls along the walls of her room, we see a general loss of authority over his mind. As Gregor's mind and body fluctuate between "Gregor the Human" and "Gregor the Parasite", he experiences a crisis of self and a decay of authority over his own being. from the narrow perspective of the story, and therein lies Kafka's genius. He sublimates Gregor's crisis of authority into a crisis of perspective and thus directly transmutes Gregor's anguish into the reader's anguish. This crisis of perspective revolves around the fact that almost the entire narrative of "Metamorphosis" is filtered through Gregor's mind and perspective. For example, when Gregor first wakes up, the reader perceives the qualities of the environment in the order in which Gregor looks at them: His room, an ordinary human bedroom, only a little too small, lay peacefully between the four family walls. Above the table, on which a collection of fabric samples had been unpacked and spread out... hung a photo... [of] a lady, in a fur cap... Gregor's eyes turned next to the window ...The last sentence tells the reader that he/she has been looking through Gregor's eyes for the entire paragraph, and indeed the language is colored by Gregor's unique situation: someone, if not a giant insect, would you call your bedroom "a normal human bedroom"? Additionally, the room has other qualities that he could have described, such as "flowered wallpaper"; however, this detail does not arrive until thirty pages later (119). Furthermore, the reader's perception of the family is limited to the voices Gregor hears through the door in Part II (109) and the things Gregor sees through the half-open door in Part III. The reader is, so to speak, imprisoned in theGregor's perspective; his thoughts and senses constitute exclusively the reader's perceptive vehicle. Furthermore, as Gregor becomes more and more estranged from himself, the reader begins to experience a similar estrangement from his own vehicle of perception. The reader begins to see the flaws within this prison of perspective and realize exactly how distorted Gregorla's perception of reality is. After all, Gregor wakes up as a monstrous parasite and almost immediately begins to worry about the train he will miss. ! Such strange irony immediately draws suspicion to Gregor's point of view. One has to wonder if his sister plays the violin as divinely as she thinks, considering the tenants' unfavorable reaction to her music. Likewise, when Gregor addresses the prosecutor, "he knows perfectly well that he is the only one who has maintained a minimum of composure", a very strange observation uttered by a giant cockroach. Such bizarre, funny, and disturbing instances serve to distance readers from the only vehicle of perception they have, just as Gregor distances himself from the only vehicle of perception (his body) he has. Therefore, Kafka's use of perspective makes Gregor's crisis of self a crisis for the reader as well. Eliot, similarly, uses the structure of "The Wasteland" to make the rejection of prophecy an integral part of the experience of the poem. . By obscuring the poem's many prophetic voices with cacophonies of fragmented voices and language, Eliot hinders the prophets' message and forces the reader to listen to them, if at all, at a distance. For example, the "Thunder" in Part V, "What the Thunder Said", is a clear prophetic voice, recalling the Thunder as the voice of the god Prajaparti in the Upanishads (Eliot, note to "The Wasteland" l. 402, p. .53). As in the Upanishads, the Thunder gives the divine command Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata: giving alms, showing compassion and exercising self-control. As in the Upanishads, all this must be understood from the only words he actually utters, "DA DA DA" ("The Waste Land", 401, 411, 418). If this prophecy seems ambiguous in the original text, one wonders how well TS Eliot's English and American audiences could appreciate this Sanskrit pun. Yet Eliot, throughout the poem, hides his words within Italian, Latin, French, German, and Sanskrit quotations and phrases, which even in his footnotes he rarely translates. Such a mix of languages ​​clouds the message of the poem's prophets and distances the unscholarly reader from understanding the poem. In other sections of “The Wasteland,” Eliot hides prophetic voices within a cacophony of vulgar and distracting voices. In the first part, "Burial of the Dead", a certain prophetic voice is noted, which includes the first four verses, "April is the cruelest month...", then it begins again with the quote from Ezekiel, "Son of man, you cannot say it, nor guess it, because you only know a bunch of broken images...", and continues until it ends with: I will show you something different both from your shadow in the morning walking behind you, and from your shadow the evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. The use of the second person and the hint of revelation in the text establishes that the voice of "Ezekiel" is prophetic. Yet this voice is only one of many strange voices in Part I, including that of the vacationer, "We went to the Hofgarten, drank coffee and talked for an hour," that of the German surrogate, "Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch", and "Marie", "And when we were children we stayed with the Archduke, with my cousin...". This varied and indiscriminate inclusion of different voices distracts the reader from the voice of "Ezekiel" and.