How Does Prufrock Play Disturb The Universe?

T.S. Eliot’s earlier poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock accurately captures the essence of the Modernist period of literature. The Modernist period spans from the beginning of the First World War in 1918 to approximately the end of World War II in 1945. Through these years in America, the country went through a tremendous amount of suffering from the loss of American lives to economic struggle that occurred between the two World Wars. This was a low time for Americans despite the “American Dream.” Prufrock was published first in 1915, the beginning of the period and later published in 1917. In his first major published piece of work, Eliot captures the views of a lonely narrator in the midst of what appears to be Prufrock leaving a party

One of the ways it can be read is Prufrock contemplating if it is worth bothering yet another persona who has no regard to his presence. Going back to the isolation imagery, one person in the large scheme of the universe is miniscule: he is one tiny speck on the large map of all of existence. Going back to the beginning of that stanza as all he asks is “Do I dare?” it appears as if Prufrock becomes self conscious of his appearance with the talk of his appearance by saying, “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)” and then stating, “My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’) which implies that he longs to go back to the days when he was young and the women that come and go would be talking to him rather than to each other “of Michelangelo” (14, 36). The continuance of loneliness appears when he contemplates “how should I presume?” in various lines all in a succession of stanzas (54, 62, 68): he contemplates how to go on after he meticulously calculates his moves in his life. This longing for earlier days gives Prufrock an appearance of being an older man who used to have friends and women talking to him, going anywhere he asked of them. The narrator seems to not want a crowd of people like he presumably once had but rather one person—this conclusion is pulled from the first

Various body parts are mentioned, but no full people are ever brought into picture (unless the mermaid is considered a person): the sight of an arm here, a back there, and a leg over there, everything appears to be going to and from in passing without regard to who else is around. Prufrock is stuck in his own world that is nothing more than a whirlwind of people passing through his life that are meaningless to him because there are no connections between him and those people. They are all complete strangers living in the same place and walking at the same time. He does, however, find a place with no other people in a corner of the universe: there are streets that are bare. While he does long to have a companion, ultimately, he appears to be rather content with being alone. If he truly were upset about not having a companion, there would be more begging of attention rather than musing about the empty streets and the yellow fog that surround the pipes and windows. Essentially, the poem would have a pleading tone to it rather than a surreal explanation of the happenings around