Eliot's reference to fragments and ruins: the first group revealed is the "He." They are a group of people who are already dead, functioning as a forshadowment of the future. The "He" community is the community of "ruins." They serve as statues representing the remnants of life. In a way they are fragments as well because they are part of a past, a piece of history, therefore they are fragments of the life cycle. Those that are living but not quite dead, the "We," will soon join the community of the "ruins" and of the dead because they are also in the process of dying. By dying they are parting themselves into fragments that no longer work and therefore can no longer live. In order for life to be sustained the body must function as whole, all organs must be working together one. But as they decay they become fragments that can no longer sustain life. By this, they are not living but merely waiting to die and become ruins themselves. This process of ones life decaying reveals the entropy of the "We" who are losing fragments of their living selves as they are dying. This reveals that life itself is ironic in nature because no matter how one lives he will always die. Similarly, Robert Frost reveals that decisions made by the living cannot manipulate the end result of death. Therefore life itself is single a road that leads to ones own fragmentation and fate of becoming a "ruin" without diversion.

In the poem, “The Wasteland,” T.S. Eliot wastes no time in creating imagery of the fragmented / ruins. Just the very form it is written in fragments the poem as a whole. Eliot mixes the motif of the fragmented with the ruined, and the first instance of the ruin in the piece comes from section I. THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD. Burials and death are both forms of physical destruction or disintegration, and Eliot sets the tone for the beginning of the poem with this theme.

Death is fragmented in the sense of its decomposition. In the second line: “Lilacs out of the dead land,” Eliot continues the theme of ruins by juxtaposing life and Nature with death. The land is dead, fragmented, and ruined.

“Memory and desire,” he says in the third line. Memories are a fragmentation of the past, and desire can often end in ruins.

Eliot continues the motif of the fragmented in that stanza, but he switches from nature and life and death to a fragment in the language with the shift from English to German: “Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.” This translates to "I am not Russian at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German." The line suggests the woman can identify herself racially, and socially, but not spiritually, and there lies more fragmentation within the individual. There is also a doubleness or double consciousness that was presented in the reading by Du Bois. Although composed or influenced by different cultures, the fragment comes with not having just one identity.

The beginning of "The Fire Sermon" offers imagery of an abandoned society, devoid of any vestiges of human life. The nymphs are departed, have left no addresses, which suggests that they have fled the barren land. Mythologically, nymphs are associated with pleasure, song, nature, and youth; clearly, this Unreal City has nothing to offer in terms of hedonism, so the nymphs have no choice but to depart without a trace, perhaps to return back to nature.

an obvious example of fragment/ ruins motif

"Tell the whole world, and keep nothing back. Raise a signal flag to tell everyone that Babylon will fall! Her images and idols will be shattered" - Jeremiah 50:2