I have demonstrated during the course of my analysis, through the analogy I have drawn with Flaubert's Tentation, that the saint's trial not only makes a significant thematic contribution to The Waste Land but also provides a crucial structural framework – a proposition corroborated by the poem's relation to work from elsewhere in Eliot's oeuvre that makes similar use of the saint: most insistently, ‘The Death of Saint Narcissus’, ‘The Love Song of St. Sebastian’, ‘The Burnt Dancer’ and the Four Quartets. Flaubert's text too forges multiple relations to the rest of his fiction, as well as affirming his avant-modernist credentials. Throughout my discussion I have sought to cement Flaubert's position as an important progenitor of modernist tendencies, a quality nowhere more evident – with a perversity itself characteristic of the age – than in his adoption of the ascetic saint as a literary hero: from Flaubert's example stems Pound's sense of the seriousness of the artist, which Flaubert links insistently to the austere attitude of the saint; Joyce – most obviously in his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – uses Flaubert's model of the ‘spiritual autobiography’ as aesthetic tract, while Fitzgerald in ‘The Crack-Up’ and more implicitly in Tender is the Night looks similarly to assert the continuing significance of the ‘dark night of the soul’ template foundational to mystical experience; it is, however, Eliot most of all who takes Flaubert's lead in imagining the saint as a definitively modern protagonist.