Meaning and Origin of The Title
The phrase "on the beach" is a Royal Navy term that means "retired from the Service."
The book also takes its name from the T. S. Eliot poem The Hollow Men, which includes the lines "In this last of meeting places // We grope together // And avoid speech // Gathered on this beach of the tumid river." Some editions of the novel, including the first 1957 edition (and the 2009 edition) by William Morrow and Company, NY, and the 1990 publication by Mandarin Paperbacks, include extracts from the poem, such as its concluding lines:
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The 1957 Morrow edition has the poem excerpts on the title page, under Nevil Shute's name.
The 2000 film ends with a quote from a Walt Whitman poem entitled "On The Beach at Night", strikingly appropriate, describing how frightening an approaching cloud bank seemed at night to the poet's child, blotting the stars out one by one, as the father and child stood on the beach on Massachusetts' North Shore. As much as it resembles the plot of Shute's novel, however (see below), a careful reading of the book gives no reference to the Whitman poem, while the T.S. Eliot poem is presented in the book's front matter.
Read more about this topic: On The Beach (novel)
Famous quotes containing the words meaning, origin and/or title:
“To summarize the contentions of this paper then. Firstly, the phrase ‘the meaning of a word’ is a spurious phrase. Secondly and consequently, a re-examination is needed of phrases like the two which I discuss, ‘being a part of the meaning of’ and ‘having the same meaning.’ On these matters, dogmatists require prodding: although history indeed suggests that it may sometimes be better to let sleeping dogmatists lie.”
—J.L. (John Langshaw)
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed,—a, to me, equally mysterious origin for it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A familiar name cannot make a man less strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)