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:
“The popularity of disaster movies ... expresses a collective perception of a world threatened by irresistible and unforeseen forces which nevertheless are thwarted at the last moment. Their thinly veiled symbolic meaning might be translated thus: We are innocent of wrongdoing. We are attacked by unforeseeable forces come to harm us. We are, thus, innocent even of negligence. Though those forces are insuperable, chance will come to our aid and we shall emerge victorious.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Bolkenstein, a Minister, was speaking on the Dutch programme from London, and he said that they ought to make a collection of diaries and letters after the war. Of course, they all made a rush at my diary immediately. Just imagine how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the “Secret Annexe.” The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)