Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Essay

Prufrock represents the modern man who he knows that life is out there, but also realises that at this later stage in his life, he will never make the most of it. In your analysis consider such literary elements such as allusions, syntax, irony, selection of details, symbolism, and figurative language.


The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S Eliot is a psychological profile of a modern man suffering from a malaise as a result of his boring, routine, repressed existence. Eliot explores, through the character of Prufrock, the emptiness of modern life where self-awareness leads only to existential paralysis and dejection. With an emphasis on a distinctive identity in which self-absorption is accompanied by alienation and complicated by insecurity, timidity and equivocation, Eliot defines a new vision of a modern antihero as an icon of the failure of identity and tradition in the modern world.

The identity of Prufrock as the modern man is exacerbated by the historical, social, and political upheavals that ripped Europe apart in the early twentieth century. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was published in 1915 during WWI, where millions died and the modern people fell into a state of mental despair and failure. T.S Eliot reflects the modern man’s mental crisis and the ugliness of urban modern civilisation through Prufrock. His passivity and the cultural dirtiness created by mediocrity constitute a searing indictment of a man bewildered by a world seemingly beyond his control - a man who lacks the moral courage to confront the situation, to assert himself and to change it. Prufrock mirrors the hostility and contempt Eliot felt towards modern twentieth century culture and encapsulates the modern man.

Prufrock epitomises a frustrated man hopelessly alienated yet desperate to communicate and connect with others. His life is filled with meaningless gestures and predictable encounter; an agonisingly unsurprising dreary world. Prufrock is an effigy...