The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock
... are key, since Eliot deploys the objective correlative technique throughout the poem rather than dwell abstractly on Prufrock's feelings. The images all speak to some part of Prufrock's personality. The etherized patient, for instance, reflects his inability to act, while the images of the city depict a certain lost loneliness. The objective correlative switches to the yellow fog that rubs its back upon the windowpanes in the second stanza. Although Eliot said the fog was suggestive of the factory smoke from his hometown St. Louis, the associations with a cat are obvious, the feline correlation seems undesirable. The fog/cat seems to be looking in on the roomful of fashionable women talking of Michelangelo. Unable to enter, it lingers pathetically on the outside of the house, and we can imagine Prufrock avoiding, yet desiring, physical contact in much the same way. Eliot again uses an image of physical debasement to explore Prufrock's self-pitying state; the cat goes down from the high windowpanes to the corners of the evening to the pools that stand in drains lets soot from the high chimneys fall on its back, then leaps from the terrace to the ground. The cat appears weak, non-confrontational, and afraid to enter the house. Moreover, Prufrock's prude-in-a-frock effeminacy emerges through the cat, as felines generally have feminine associations. Prufrock indecisively cycles around even the smallest of concerns: and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of a toast and tea. He seems rooted in the present tense and this is an unhealthy approach to time. He is clearly a thinker, not a feeler, and his indecisive thoughts contribute directly to his paralysis, perhaps the most important theme in the poem. As the image of the cat unable to penetrate the house suggests, Prufrock cannot make a decision and act on it. Instead of a flowing duration that integrates all of time, he is imprisoned in the present. The poem later states, “And I have known the eyes already, known them all - The eyes that fix you in a formulated phase, And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall.” Sprawling on a pin refers to the practice of pinning insect specimens for study, suggesting Prufrock feels similarly scrutinized, but the key here is Prufrock's discussion of eyes. Prufrock isolates the body part from the rest of the body. Detached, the eyes multiply in power; they dominate both the room and the bodies of those who look at Prufrock. He feels like he is under examination. But Prufrock shows a wise self-regard when he admits he is “not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a scene or two, Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool, Deferential, glad to be of use, Politic, cautious, and meticulous” Hamlet, Shakespeare's famous tragic hero from the play of the same name, is literature's other great indecisive man. Hamlet waffles between wanting to kill his s...