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 and, meaning, origin and/or title:
“Every time a child organizes and completes a chore, spends some time alone without feeling lonely, loses herself in play for an hour, or refuses to go along with her peers in some activity she feels is wrong, she will be building meaning and a sense of worth for herself and harmony in her family.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“God ... created a number of possibilities in case some of his prototypes failed—that is the meaning of evolution.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“The origin of storms is not in clouds,
our lightning strikes when the earth rises,
spillways free authentic power:
dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel
to break the armored and concluded mind.”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)
“All his works might well enough be embraced under the title of one of them, a good specimen brick, “On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History.” Of this department he is the Chief Professor in the World’s University, and even leaves Plutarch behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)