Prufrock: a Representative of the Modern Man in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

戴嘉萱

【Abstract】As a representative figure of modern poets, the works of T. S. Eliot display the intense feature of modernity. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze the modern characteristics lie in Prufrock in the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

【Key words】T. S. Eliot; love song; modern man

As one of the earliest of Eliots major works, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, is generally regarded as the beginning of Eliots career as an influential poet. It is considered as “the first masterpiece of modernism in English” in Encyclopedia Britannica. Pound claimed that Eliot "has actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own. The rest of the promising young have done one or the other, but never both” (Perkins, 1976:495).

I. The split world

There are two worlds in this poem, Prufrocks inner world and the outside world. Most of the poem is Prufrocks interior monologue, and his illusionary world seems to be true and believable, but everything in reality is intangible, ambiguous. After reading, it is hard for the readers to distinguish which one is the reality that Prufrock lives in. Through the emphasis of Prufrocks illusion and the fading of reality, the poem reflects modern peoples existence of self-division and alienation.

The poem moves from a series of concrete physical settings. The world in the poem is rather a trivial world. People may spend their time with playing cards and tea parties, which seemed to be the most significant events there can be. The city that the poem describes is lifeless and gloomy. The famous “patient etherized upon a table” vividly describes the modern society that is eroded and twisted by industrialization. Through this, we can see that the city Prufrock lived in is desolate, chaotic and dirty, people live there also shares the statement of laziness and stress, which also shows the moral deficiency of modern people.

II. The meaningless life

Prufrock mentions that the place, the people and the type of life that they live is all familiar to him. He has been a visitor there and has spent a considerable time there. Women in the poem lived in a grimy city lead their lives in boredom, but what they are talking were Michelangelo, an artist who turned his sufferings into great art. The women talking of him do not properly understand his value as an artist, and they are chattering about him as if he were a movie star. The comparison of the brilliance of Renaissance with the insignificant existence of modern people formed irony and the tension between greatness and triviality.

Also, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”. The image of measuring life with coffee spoons is highly symbolic. Life should be vast and infinite, and no one can ever measure it, however large container he uses, ironically, here is “coffee spoons”. This is Prufrocks view of life. This indicates that he is a man wandering aimlessly, wasting his life in trivial activities. It seems that he has lost interest in almost everything and saw through the meaninglessness of existence. In Eliots early poems written under the immediate impact of French symbolist poets, he was already fascinated by this same, but here in this poem, the sense of depression, of meaninglessness, is much heavier and much more oppressive (Zhang Jian, 1996:33)

III. The inability to love

Unlike what is suggested by the title, there are no romantic elements in the poem. The modern man depicted in the poem is rootless and without any goal. The poem is a song of frustration and emotional conflict, and the words are from the bottom of Prufrocks heart.

The irony is that, while the title names the poem as a love song, all the poem does is to overthrow such a title. The poem turns out to be a song about the inability to love. Prufrocks plight is his own self-consciousness. Eliot makes his protagonist fall in love, but also fear the love he lets himself slip into. He feels his desire, but he also ridicules himself for having that kind of desire. His task is not to persuade his lover, but to persuade himself. To fall in love is by no means the way out of his predicament. Thus he is shown to have fallen in love while constantly denying it as well.

IV. The sense of reality

Also, the pome carries the sense of reality in the poem. For example although the poem is not immediately related to the First World War, the outbreak of war did become a proper background for it. It is worth noting that whenever Prufrock escapes from the monotony of human community to the fantasy of his own world, his mind pictures the scenes of death. The evening is like a patient etherized for an operation, struggling between life and death. The nights are restless, the restaurants are cheap where violence is common.

Generally, metaphor and symbol replace direct statement in Eliot. In this poem, we can also see the literary doctrine of Eliot- objective correlative. In Eliots own words, “the only way of expressing emotion is by finding an ‘objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion,” and which will evoke the same emotion from the reader (M. H. Abrams, 2011 :261).

The tragedy of Prufrock is related to his time, but ultimately his problem can only be solved by himself. As a representative of the modern people, he has found the split personality, the loss of hope, and the anxiety, but unable to do anything to change this state. Eliot commented on the poem in an interview in Granite Review, where he says, “Prufrock was partly a dramatic creation of a man of about 40… and partly an expression of felling of my own. I always feel that dramatic characters that seem living creations have something of the author in them” (Miller, 2005:154). What Eliot said, implies that there is certain connection lies between Prufrock and the poet himself. Like Prufrock, Eliot has faced many problems in his life and like the character Eliot tried hard to solve the problems in modern society. Just like the epigraph preceded The Waste Land, when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? She replied I want to die. As an acute observer and recorder of the modern world, T. S. Eliot speaks out the voice of one typical contemporary people- “I was neither Living nor dead”.

References：

[1]Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Co Inc, 2011.

[2]Miller, James Edwin. T. S. Eliot: The Making of an American Poet, 1888-1922. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005.

[3]Perkins, David. A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1976.

[4]張劍.艾略特與英國浪漫主義傳統.北京:外語教學與研究出版社,1996.