The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock

Words: 887
Pages: 4

The “Fake’’ Song of a “Small Person’’

A poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by Thomas Eliot depicts a sad story of a lonely, dejected, joyless life of a man by the name Prufrock. To underline the sarcastically dull tone of the whole piece the author even vests the tiresome name in protagonist. Being influenced by the post World War I environment, Eliot manages to reproduce the mood of a “modern’’ society in the face of a scared, doubting, repellent, and paltry character. The image of a “small person’’ created by the author in the poem makes a reader compassionately share his feelings and emotional experience due to the range of technics of literary modernism used in it.

In the beginning, who or what is a “small’’ person and how
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“Let us go then, you and I… Let us go and make our visit,’’ a sign of multiple personalities of Prufrock stresses the fact that either the hero is lonely, or does not trust anyone with his thoughts and feelings afraid to be betrayed, or even both (“Prufrock’’ 1,12). Moreover, the random structure of the plot speaks about subjective consciousness as a signature of modernism pointing out the fragmentation phenomenon …show more content…
The synthesis of poetic form, allusion, light symbolism, and juxtaposition completes the dramatic monologue. From one side, Prufrock represents a man willing to rebel and to fight for romantic feelings, inner passion of a complaisant, respectful, and loyal modern man. From the other side, he is pretended, indecisive, and tongue-tied person realizing his weakness in front of the social norms and dogmas. Therefore, the confrontation between the inner desire and dreams and a real life picture suppressing human individuality creates a pompous love story turning it into a “fake story’’ of a cruel and unfair world. For this reason, the protagonist decides to reject the riot owing to insignificance of his life confirmed by the next line “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons’’ (51). Using a visual language, the author shows the reader the idea of a “small person,’’ whose life is so unimportant and disappointing that it can be measured by such a tiny object as a coffee spoon. Therefore, the analogy between life and a cup of coffee can be made concluding its manifesto of scantiness of life’s