The Alienation of Modern Man in T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Modern man has been conceptualized as a being in a conflict between self and society. His/her life is full of confusion including alienation and indecisiveness. From this perspective, T. S. Eliot, one of the most influential poets of the modern era and winner of Nobel Prize in literature, presents such images in his renowned work, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. In this poem, Eliot problematizes such miseries of modern man’s life as timelessness, passivity, and impotency of love, and he tries to show these facts from various parts of the poem. Therefore, ‘The Love song Of J. Alfred Prufrock’ deals with spiritually exhausted people who are dwelled in the alienated modern era and T. S. Eliot introduces Prufrock as a representative character who cannot reconcile his thoughts with his feelings and will. Thus, this study surveys the way modern social challenges force the traumatic man to take refuge in the shadow of ‘etherization’, and it also investigates different reasons behind modern man’s lack of stability in ‘The love song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

Keywords:

Prufrock , modern man , Eliot , alienation , indecisiveness