Is it true that human life is like tram cars? Well, the answer is hiding in Somerset Maugham’s The Lotus Eater. The famous English writer has painted some unknown yet inevitable parts of human life in his writings. His matchless creation, The Lotus Eater, is one of the impeccable short stories uncovering that actual routine-based human life on earth. It clearly explains that human life is like tram cars.
Yes, the opening paragraph of the short story The Lotus Eater begins with an appealing introduction. It depicts the inner reality of the so-called diverting human life. There is a very familiar concept that ordinary people often have to spend their lives in intense hardships. They become victims of the rat race, always running for money.
Their prime preference is earning. However, they never create space to spend the money and make opportunities to enjoy life. Earning, not delight, is the prior aim during the first phase of their early mature life. Only a minimal number of people get the opportunity to choose and cherish a pleasurable lifestyle.
In The Lotus Eater, Somerset Maugham tries to explore and understand the difference between the diverting lifestyle and the ordinary people’s monotonous lifestyle. As a watcher of practical life, the author has attempted to find the common and the exceptional modes of human life. His curiosity leads him to realize the difference or contrast between the unusual and ordinary ways of living. With profound insight, the author has tried to learn this by comparing the strange lifestyle of Thomas Wilson, the pivotal or chief character of the story.
The storyline shows Thomas Wilson prefers to choose a living style that is somewhat strange for the conventional world. He sees life from a different point of view. Spending life like a mere apostle searching for ways to obtain bread and butter is not his priority. His paving is entirely different from the one that general men and women bear with them. Embracing the unconventional mode to find the actual meaning of living emerges as his ultimate goal. And, in this unusual preference lies the exact meaning of human life for Wilson.
It is a bitter truth that most ordinary people have no choice but to spend a dull, monotonous, routine-bound mode of living. They consider survival as the journey of eating and sleeping. They hardly feel the need to obtain fresh, new, delightful ways of spending their lives. Now, Maugham compares this said majority of the ordinary men and women to tram cars. He opines that human life is like tram cars constantly moving through the same track. In short, surviving here remains a friend of monotony and dullness. Special or exciting events become companions like once in a blue moon.
These people seldom get the luck to taste life differently. In a word, there is a rare chance of deviation from the known, usual way of living.
Tram cars always move forward and backward on the same rail tracks. And no deviation is visible from that typical line of movement. Even no different turn or swing in any other direction is possible. Similarly, most common men and women have to bear what their circumstances have thrust upon them. They don’t have any choice but to spend their daily life in the same tedious, humdrum way.
It is one of the valuable questions whether or not these people ever try to find a new road to walk. Even it is often not known whether anyone of them ever question this tedious existence and try to get rid of this tiresome survival. Maugham’s words in The Lotus Eater rightly question this one-track human mindset. The storyline uncovers a bitter reality and simultaneously mocks the insipid thinking potential.
It shows that most ordinary people spend their days being calm and dumb in a tasteless, monotonous way, with only moaning and murmuring till their death. Similarly, tram cars are sold as scrap iron pieces after prolonged wear and tear in a similar routine-bound process. And it happens when they are no longer in a state to be used. No doubt, most ordinary people face the same destiny. After having a purposeful existence, when life turns into a piece of little purpose or no importance, then it becomes meaningless. It gets lost over time and removed from human records. Indeed, human life is like trams cars.
The deep pathos, lying in the inner part of human lives, is the ultimate destiny of most people. It is undeniably a painful reality that humans bear the same fate of revolving along with the same old, tedious, dull courses that the tram cars run regularly on the same rail tracks uninterruptedly without any relief.
It seems that, like the tram cars, most men and women have no words to utter regarding their existence. Why they don’t feel the urge to raise a question about this is not known. They seem to have been forced to surrender to the situation in which they were forced to live. Maugham, for sure, has delicately presented a profound, meaningful analogy to describe human life.
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