The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

T.S. Elliot, an ex-patriot from the post World War I era, is one of the Fathers of “Some Attributes of Modern Literature”. My favorite attribute is ” The use of such structural approaches to experience as psychoanalysis, myth, the symbolic apprehension and comprehension of reality.” In Elliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“, the main character is greatly affected psychologically, and eventually commits suicide. In Carol Christ’s analysis of Prufrock, she mentions how Prufrock is very unstable. She says “Moreover, the images associated with Prufrock are themselves, as Pinkney observes, terrifingly unstable….The poem, in these various ways, decomposes the body, making abviguous its sexual identification.” Throughout the poem, you only see bits and pieces of the girl Prufrock imagines himself with, just an arm, eyes, nose, things of that sort, and they are placed with inanimate objects, like the sky, the fog, the street. This gives you the perception that Prufrock is an unstable character.