Skip to main navigation menu Skip to main content Skip to site footer
##common.pageHeaderLogo.altText##

Articles

Volume 09, Number 2 (1984)

Allusions in Under the Volcano: Function and Pattern

  • Keith Harrison
Submitted
May 22, 2008
Published
1984-06-06

Abstract

While writers such as Joyce, Eliot, and Pound used allusions of an orderly past to impose structure and order on a chaotic present, Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano makes no such temporal distinction; the allusions in the novel are wholly analogous, linking past and present through sameness rather than through contrast. In Under the Volcano, allusions imply not antithesis but identity, fusing past and present. Lowry's novel is a Dantean and a mythological allegory: many events correspond to the sufferings and punishments of Dante's criminals, as well as to the criminal/heroes of Greek myth such as Sisyphus and Prometheus.