Prufrock: crisis and lack of communication in modern life, the prufockian paralysis

Prufrock: crisis and lack of communication in modern life, the prufockian paralysis

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is one of the most influential poems of the twentieth century. It is certainly not a love song like any that had been written before. “These fragments, I have shored up against my ruins”, said Eliot of his Waste land .Although Eliot does not explore the sterility of the modern world as deeply here as he does in "The Wasteland" (1922), the images are undeniably bleak and empty. The rottenness, the corruption and decadence of contemporary modern society is exposed with a rare poignancy here. Urban in setting, full of images symbols and references, drawn from various sources, the poem mercilessly exposes the boredom, inaction, restlessness of modern city life. In the "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" the dramatic exposition enters the dynamic consciousness of its title character, whose feelings, thoughts and emotions are displayed in a motley but organized sequence, as they ride the man's wavering mood. His is a mood wavering more often towards haplessness than fulfillment, because Prufrock is a man caught in a vicious cycle of introspection, journey, and retreat, a man experiencing a mid life crisis, brought about by society, and sustained by his own fear and reluctance.

The Modernists claim their writing should mirror their fractured and chaotic world. Eliot felt the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art 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. The poem begins with an invitation by Prufrock to join him in his travels through a city that is growing increasingly modern, while Prufrock himself is afraid, or unable, to change with it. His description of the way he sees his environment can elucidate much about the character himself. Eliot tries to lay bare the mind of the protagonist Prufrock, a bundle of frustration, nervous-breakdown and indecisiveness. The poem begins with striking parallelism between two dissimilar things:

                    “Let us go then, you and I,

                     When the evening is spread out against the sky

                      like the patient etherized upon a table”.

The contrast between the wide stretch of the sky and the etherized patient, reflects Prufrock’s paralysis, his inability to act while the images of the city depict a certain lost loneliness. The objective correlative switches to the "yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes". The fog/cat seems to be looking in on the roomful of fashionable women "talking of Michelangelo". Unable to enter, it lingers pathetically on the outside of the house, and one can imagine Prufrock avoiding, yet desiring.

           

Oscillating and vacillating over the two extremes whether to declare love to the lady or not, Prufrock is virtually aware of his psychological barrenness, his growing age, bald head, futile measurement of modern life: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoon”. With an ironic tone Prufrock is less immediate with the love proposal, whereas Prufrock has only ‘wept and fasted’ ‘wept and prayed’ to prepare a face to face the declaration of love. Repressed by inaction, his abortive silence ends in an ‘overwhelming question’ of lack of faith in his own self :‘Do I dare? Do I dare?’

            Prufrock’s helplessness and his struggle to release himself from ennui and inertia is the ultimate spiritual crisis of the protagonist. He is the poor worm fixed to a wall by a sharp needle and wriggling to get freed. The merciless penetrating fierce eyes of the so modern ladies have cooled every spark of fire inside Prufrock. With greater effort if ever he declares his love, he is not sure  "And how should I presume?" Eliot's objective correlative grows more vague; what exactly does Prufrock feel here? Prufrock's vision is incommunicable, and whatever he says to the lady will be answered by, "That is not what I meant at all./That is not it, at all".

The unsung love story of Prufrock places the hero on unheroic terms, his timidity exceed further to neurosis. He is a timid and compares himself even to a crab:

      “I should have been a pair of ragged claws

       Scuttling across the floors of silent seas?”

Being a crab and roaming inside deep domain of unseen seas, the unheroic modern man can’t hear mermaid singing as they applauded the brave and adventurous Ulysses and mariners. Instead Prufrock malingers like a cat, undecided like Hamlet, reseals void soul of Lazarus, intrigues like Polonius.

            Prufrock's paralysis follows naturally from this subjectivizing of everything, he has an equally unhappy relation to time and space.  If all space has been assimilated into his mind, he remains imprisoned in his own subjective space, and all his experience is imaginary. Time disappears in the same way time, like space, has only a subjective existence for Prufrock. As a result, past, present, and future are equally immediate, and Prufrock is paralyzed. Like one of Bradley's finite centers, he "is not in time," and "contains his own past and future". Prufrock thus stands a modern man who is spiritually bankrupt and creatively barren into the vast world of infertile waste land, the modern society.