Fragmentation--- The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T. S. Eliot is an outstanding author and one of the represents of Modernism. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was one of T. S. Eliot’s first published poems, and remains one of his most famous. Eliot utilizes this poem not only to illustrate the psychological aspect of a person, but also to reveal the psychological aspect of his time. The speaker of this ironic monologue is a modern, urban man who, like many of his kind, feels isolated and incapable of decisive action. Prufrock would like to speak of love to a woman, but he does not dare so hesitates all the way there. In this poem, the outstanding feature is fragmentation, which we can see from the whole structure, the writing style (the rhetorical devices, the rhyme scheme, the stanza etc.), the use of space and time, and the last but not the least, the personality of Prufrock, which, gains most of my attention.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" depicts the consciousness of a single character, a timid, middle-aged man. Prufrock is talking or thinking to himself. The epigraph, a dramatic speech taken from Dante's Inferno", provides a key to Prufrock's nature. For the first forty-eight lines of the poem, he contemplates the aimless pattern of his divided and solitary self. He is a lover, yet he is unable to bring himself to declare his love. He is both the "you and I" of line 1, pacing the city's grimy streets on his lonely walk. He observes the foggy evening settling down on him. Growing more and more hesitant, he postpones of the moment of his decision. Should a middle-aged man even think of making a proposal of love? "Do I dare / Disturb the universe?" he asks. In lines 49-110, Prufrock wrestles with his desire and his doubt. And, in lines 87-110, he imagines how foolish he would feel if he were to make his proposal only to discover that the woman had never thought of him as a possible lover; he imagines her brisk, cruel response: "That is not what I meant, at all."

Finally, in lines 111-131, Prufrock decides that he lacks the will to make his declaration. "I am not Prince Hamlet," he says; he will not, like Shakespeare's character, attempt to shake off his doubts and "force the moment to its crisis." He feels more like the aging, foolish Polonius, another character in Hamlet. He is able only to dream of romance. Thus, in the youthful fashion of the time (around 1910), he will have his trousers tripped with cuffs at the bottom. He will "walk upon the beach," though he probably will not venture near the water. He has had a romantic vision of mermaids singing an enchanting song, but assumes that they will not sing to him. Prufrock is paralyzed, unable to act upon his impulses and desires. He will continue to live in a world of romantic daydreams - "the chambers of the sea" - until he is awakened by the "human voices" of real life in which he "drowns."

Prufrock is a man with many contradictive, fragmental characteristics. One part of himself would like to startle them out of their meaningless lives, but to accomplish this he would have to risk disturbing his "universe," being rejected. The latter part of the poem captures his sense defeat for failing to act courageously. The relation between “I” and “you”, namely, the alter ego, is neither friendly nor aloof. The "you" that is "I"'s counterpart stands in two places at once, both inside and outside Prufrock's mind and inside and outside scenes that can with difficulty be imagined based on the minimal details provided. “I” am talking on and on, but “you” are quiet all the time. “I” am sentimental but “you” are nonchalant. “I” am angry about being nothing but neither “I” nor “you” will or can do anything about it.

J. Alfred Prufrock , with all the fragmental personality, is not just the speaker of one of Eliot's poems. He is the Representative Man of early Modernism, and the fragmental modern world. Shy, cultivated, oversensitive, sexually retarded, ruminative, isolated, self-aware to the point of solipsism, as he says, "Am an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two." Nothing revealed the Victorian upper classes in Western society more accurately, and nothing better exposed the dreamy, insubstantial center of that consciousness than a half-dozen poems in Eliot's first book. The speakers of all these early poems are trapped inside their own excessive alertness. They look out on the world from deep inside some private cave of feeling, and though they see the world and themselves with unflattering exactness, they cannot or will not do anything about their dilemma and finally fall back on self-serving explanation. They quake before the world, and their only revenge is to be alert.

Prufrock epitomizes the frustration and impotence of the modern individual. He seemed to represent thwarted desires and modern disillusionment. Such phrases as "I have measured out my life in coffee spoons" (line 51) capture the sense of the unheroic nature of life in the twentieth century. Prufrock feels that he is isolated from the modern society, that he is only a fell apart piece of fragment of the society. He longs for being one part of the society. He feels shameful and depressed to hear the women talking of Michelangelo while he can’t. He wears in the same style as that of the upper class:
42 My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
43 My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin –
But in the sentences:
70 Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
71 And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
72 Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...
He imagines himself to be an onlooker and sees others’ life but only to find that others are in the same situation as him. Everybody are the same. He is a fragment of the society, he is isolated and lonely but actually the other people are the same. The whole society is made up with thousands and hundreds of single fragments.

Eliot's use of bits and pieces of all sorts of fragmentation suggests that although anxiety-provoking, fragmentation is nevertheless productive. He has his own theory of fragmentation, which we can see from the kinds of imagery Eliot uses. They suggest that something new can be made from the ruins: The series of hypothetical encounters at the poem's center are iterated and discontinuous but nevertheless lead to a sort of epiphany (albeit a dark one) rather than just leading nowhere. Eliot also introduces an image that will recur in his later poetry, that of the scavenger. Prufrock thinks that he "should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Crabs are scavengers, garbage-eaters who live off refuse that makes its way to the sea floor. Eliot's discussions of his own poetic technique (see especially his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent") suggest that making something beautiful out of the refuse of modern life, as a crab sustains and nourishes itself on garbage, may, in fact, be the highest form of art. At the very least, this notion subverts romantic ideals about art; at best, it suggests that fragments may become reintegrated, that art may be in some way therapeutic for a broken modern world. In The Waste Land, crabs become rats, and the optimism disappears, but here Eliot seems to assert only the limitless potential of scavenging.

However fragmental and unallocated the whole poem is, it is disordered but not messy, and it is pleasingly asymmetrical. The all sorts of contents of the poem are not linked by the logic but by the emotion. Associated meditation is the clue that runs through the poem and compounds the things that seem to be unconnected but actually express the same feeling. The fragments vividly and adequately convey to us the great theme of this poem, namely, the spiritual debility and fragmentation of the modern individual and the society. The apparently messy and disordered fragments produce the great charm of the poem. This works in concert with T.S.Eliot’s literature theory.