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:
“Even in my own writings I cannot always recover the meaning of my former ideas; I know not what I meant to say, and often get into a regular heat, correcting and putting a new sense into it, having lost the first and better one. I do nothing but come and go. My judgement does not always forge straight ahead; it strays and wanders.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I wish not to be given a title or an appointed position. I can and will do more good if I were made a Federal Agent at Large, and I will help best by doing it my way through my communications with people of all ages. First and Foremost I am an entertainer but all I need is the Federal Credentials.”
—Elvis Presley (1935–1977)