"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Paper Summary:

This paper briefly examines the language of doubleness in Eliot's poem. It explains how T.S. Eliot prepares the reader to sense the confessional tone of this monologue uttered by a man helplessly at war with himself.

From the Paper:

"In the passage from Dante's Inferno, Count Guido da Montefeltro states that he believes himself free to be honest because the person he reveals his secrets to will seemingly never return from hell. By choosing this passage, Eliot succeeded in two important objectives: the first is to equate the "hell" of eternal damnation in Dante's story to the hellish insecurity of the Prufrock's self-deprecating state of mind where Montefeltro's assertion that his words wont return to earth are linked to Prufrock's certainty that no one will listen to him or understand his intentions accurately, and secondly, he succeeds in establishing a tone of secrecy and a sense of alienation to which the reader will imagine she is privy to as she observes the contradictions of the speaker's fractured ego."

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