Discuss the Role of Tiresias in T. S. Eliot's “The Waste Land”.

The Waste Land is a rich, dense mosaic with five sections, and in view of its 'rich disorganization' it needs a protagonist, or at least a point of view. The spokesman of this point of view is perhaps Tiresias; in fact he is the seer of The Waste Land.

Role of Tiresias in "The Waste Land":

As a fore suffering seer and poet, Tiresias shows that the poem is basically lyrical observation on the present, confirmed by a metaphoric relation to past myths. These myths perform the function of projecting the poet's vision.

Eliot discovered Tiresias in classical sources: Sophocles, Seneca and Ovid. As we have seen, Eliot often uses Greek myth - the rape of Philomel and the story of Diana and Actaeon, for example to suggest barbarian cruelty in matters of sex. Tiresias is a further example of this, as the passage from Ovid that Eliot cites in his Notes makes clear. Tiresias has had the experience of living in both genders, while his blindness and gift of prophecy are a direct result of his interference in a debate between the father of the gods and his wife as to whether men or women derive more pleasure from Sex Here, indeed, is a cruel chain of events; but with the appearance of Tiresias in the Waste Land of Oedipus's Thebes, he becomes further associated with sexual violence, sin and punishment.

Tiresias has existed across all time and space as both the epitome and the observer of mankind's suffering. Because he is also male and female he has an intuitive understanding of both genders. He can appreciate simultaneously the world of the Prophets; the lover in the Hofgarten; the querent at Madame Sosostris's; Stetson; the man in "A Game of Chess"; the 'carbuncular' clerk in "The Fire Sermon": Phlebas and the questor in "What the Thunder Said." Simultaneously he is at one with the women: Marie and the two failed prohetesses, the Cumaean Sybil and Madame Sosostris; the women in 'A Game of Chess', and the typist in 'The Fire Sermon'. And he is the surreal, neurotic lady in "What the Thunder Said". It so being, Tiresias epitomises the experience of all men and all women-of mankind itself, in fact.

In one of his Notes Eliot tells us that Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a character is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. According to Eliot, what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. Evidently Tiresias is an embodiment of the modern mind. He is the keen observer who is "powerless to act."