Modernist Sense of the End and Postmodernist Illusion of the End

Abstract

In this paper we carry out a comparative analysis of selected texts of modernists T. S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats and postmodernists Samuel Beckett and Graham Swift to determine the nature of their conflicting perspectives on the future. The study attempts to find out how the modernists' vision of the messiah and of history as a metanarrative indicates their sense of the end. Conversely, this analysis seeks to establish in what way the postmodernists' treatment of pseudomessiahs and history as a local narrative signifies their illusion of the end.The End is a fact of life and a fact of imagination. 1 We have to get used to the idea that there is no end any longer, there will no longer be any end, that history itself has become interminable. 2