Indecision: One of J. Alfred Prufrock’s central neuroses arises from the fact that he does not know what to do with himself. Prufrock’s indecision is a source of anxiety that causes his mind to unravel. His anxiety makes him indecisive, and his indecisiveness in turn makes him more anxious. Prufrock’s personal refrains are “Do I dare?” and “Should I presume?” Prufrock lives in a world stripped of cultural conventions and guidelines which causes a state of terrifying, unrestricted freedom. As the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard remarked, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” Confronted with choices and possibilities, Prufrock finds himself gripped by anxiety. Thus he weighs dilemmas such as, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” Though such a dilemma is comical, ridiculous even, we moderns understand his crisis. In an age in which all values and customs are disputable, it is difficult to decide what to stand for and how to conduct oneself. In a sense, Prufrock’s flexible moral sensibility is admirable and necessary. The downside is his utter lack of self-determination. In some respects, he is a coward. Show
Loneliness: It becomes apparent early on in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” that the titular character is lonely, sexually, romantically and existentially. Prufrock finds himself haunted by women, by their judgments and withheld affections. He is afraid to speak to elegant women for fear that they might scornfully declare “‘That is not what I meant at all.’” He is haunted by the prostitutes he has visited in “one-night cheap hotels”; he wonders at his weakness asking, “Is it perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress?” Finally, as the poem reaches its conclusion, he is haunted by mermaids, archetypal figures of feminine seduction. In what is perhaps the poem’s most famous passage, he reflects: “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. / I do not think that they will sing to me.” Aging: One of J. Alfred Prufrock’s great sources of anxiety is mortality. As a man just entering middle age, How significantly has Eliot portrayed the conflict of a modern man in the poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”?Or, What is Prufrock’s dilemma? Does he succeed in resolving it? There is hardly found any modern man who has never been suffered from frustration. More or less a man of present time gets frustrated at several spheres in his life. The epigraph of the poem heightens Prufrock’s frustration. It refers to the torture of Guido da Montefeltro in the eighth circle of the Inferno. He is tortured in hell for the sin of fraud through evil it council. And Prufrock is tortured, as he is guilty of fraud because he has perverted the human reason by directing it into pointless fantasy. The dramatic beginning is one of the main characteristics of a modern poem.The poem starts with a proposal made by the protagonist. Observing the dramatic proposal of Prufrock, it seems that he is very serious to say his words to the unknown lady. He proposes. Let us go then, You and I. The modern world is full of complexity and anxiety. Nobody here is in peace. There always remains a gap between the want and getting of the people. They want more but get less. For different socio-economical causes, a modern man can’t marry at proper time. And for that, his outward appearance becomes unattractive. As Prufrock says: “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair. Prufrock, the hero, wants to propose one of his known women. He can’t decide whether he should tell or not. This indecisiveness is a marked characteristic of a modern man. Prufrock says: Do I dare? Later he says; Then how should I begin A modern man’s complexity is really very tough to imagine. What he wants tosay can’t be expressed quietly. Eliot has depicted this broken image in his poem. In some lines, he did not mark the end; the line remained incomplete. The lines continue with such as, To lead you to an overwhelming question…………. It seems to us that Prufrock is a man of defeated idealism and tortured by unsatisfied desire. He is unimportant to others, but aware of his own despair. He does not dare to seek love because he is afraid of disappointment. Prufrock is a sensitive man caught in a stupid world. He is an aging romantic entrapped by a rotten world of pseudo gentility. As a result of his timidity, he has become incapable of action of any sort. Prufrock witnesses ‘sea-girls’ with romantic mood though he is consciously unheroic. These factors make him a comic figure, but his awareness makes him a tragic one. He reminds us that no problem is trivial to the man who faces it. [adToAppearHere] The action of the poem is limited. The inaction or reluctance to action gives the poem a rich tone of modernity. Literally, the ‘I’ and `You’ of the poem are not two person, rather, two aspects of the same person- the self (You) and the physical body (I). Prufrock’s physical body is thin, wispy, and weak. It is judged by others and condemned. And the self i.e, the ego is injured by the disgrace of the personality. The two, opposed to each other and united to each other, destroy Prufrock, and at the end of the poem we hear the most tragic words “We drown”. Another modern quality of the poem is that thepoet borrows theme and lines from well-known or classic literary pieces. Forexample, he writes, “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.” Here by drawing the example of the great artist, Eliot hints at the trivialities of modern fashionable ladies. This triviality may have been brought from Alexander pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”. Similarly, the line ‘squeezed the universe into a ball’ ay have been taken from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”. Prufrock lives in a world of fantasy and daydreams of which the Monologue itself is a symptom of modernity. In his imaginative world, he neither accepts nor rejects love. He, instead, has created a false notion of it, which has prevented him from any kind of action. Through the course of the poem, he has grown out of sentimentality riven by desire for something that he can’t achieve. Prufrock is a modern man and the love song is a modern poem in consideration of its closeness to modernism. Indecisiveness, broken image, mental conflict, dramatic beginning e.t.c,are the characteristics of modern poetry. And all the above things we find significantly in the love song. From the above discussion, we may conclude that the love song represents the conflict of the modern man. It is a poem of a being divided between passion and timidity and it develops a theme of frustration and emotional conflict. The poem, actually, moves from ‘Should I begin’? ‘How begin? To “Shall I say?” But the action comes to the point of inaction. This is the conflict of a modern man and of modern society. What is the main idea of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?One of the poem's central themes is social anxiety and how it affects Prufrock's ability to interact with those around him. This line, like the others in the tea scene, is indicative of the discomfort Prufrock feels in social situations and his belief that he needs to put on a "face" or mask in order to fit in.
What is the conflict in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?The poem highlights the dilemma and indecisiveness as well as the squalor and barrenness of modern urban civilization. Prufrock's affairs with women are a device to escape the loneliness of his life.
What is Prufrock thinking of at the end of the poem?At the end of the poem, this oceanic imagery returns, with Prufrock hearing the song of the mermaids but thinking that they would not sing to him, only to each other.
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