Analysis Of The Lovesong Of J. Alfred Prufrock

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1. Who is J. Alfred Prufrock? The answer is not stated in the poem. You will have to make an argument and defend it. • I think that in the Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, J. Alfred Prufrock is the narrator and he starts off as being a young man maybe in his twenties and throughout the poem he gets progressively older, becoming middle-aged and then elderly. “Let us go, through certain half deserted streets; The muttering retreats; Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels… Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’; Let us go and make our visit; In the room the women come and go,” (Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot, lines 10 – 19). To me, the above passage describes drunken nights with one-night stands, whose only purpose …show more content…

Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot is the Narrators’ hair. The hair is mentioned in three separate parts of the story and its gradual changes that irk the Narrator. “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair; (They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’),” (Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot, lines 46 – 47). The Narrator is vainly interested in what people will think about his growing baldness, not because he doesn’t like it but because he doesn’t like the idea of people making a fuss about it. This depicts the Narrator’s age perfectly because most young people, prior to 30, embarrass easily and focus on the exterior issues more than the interior issues. “But though I have wept and fasted wept and prayed; Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,” (Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot, lines 86 – 88). The Narrator continue the middle-age crisis trend by weeping over his loss of attraction because not only does he feel it slipping away and becoming a distant memory but there is physical proof for everyone to clearly see; that he is aging. “I grow old… Shall I part my hair behind?”, (Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, T.S. Eliot, lines 127 – 129). I find this bit kind of humorous because to me it entails that the Narrators no longer has any hair on the top of his hair but only on the edges of his skull. In my mind when the Narrator describes parting his hair, it looks like those older people with the long balding ponytails that are usually found at the

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