Student Essay on Hesitation, Repression, and Indecisiveness in the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot's use of literary device such as imagery and repetition in the poem serve to emphasize Prufrock's hesitation, repression of desire, and indecisiveness.

Impotent, pathetic, inadequate, timid. Everyone knows a J. Alfred Prufrock, and everyone has a bit of him in himself or herself. Just like Prufrock we readers have been witness to the pretentious triviality of others, the women who "come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo" (lines 13-14), and the lack of confidence which prevents the realization of desires. Eliot's careful choice of epigraph from Dante's Inferno reverberates throughout this poem as the logic behind Prufrock sharing his feelings with his listener. Just as Guido da Montefeltro is certain his listener shares a similar fate as himself, so to does Prufrock believe that his listener is like himself, and will never "turn back and descend the stair" (line 39). Prufrock's insecurities mirror our own. "He is", as Harold Bloom states in his thematic analysis, "insecure about his thinning.....