Late Literary Analysis: The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

So here I am, trying to go back and catch up on the work that I didn’t get done when I should have…so, here we go!

1.       “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a poem by TS Eliot; it begins with the narrator, J Alfred Prufrock, inviting the reader to take a walk through a city. He describes the yellow fog that pervades the city, and social gatherings, including some women discussing Michelangelo (he refers to them a couple of times). Prufrock insists that there are many things to be done, and frets about seemingly insignificant matters (his physical appearance, clothing, eating a peach…). Prufrock also describes his aging body.

2.       The theme of the poem is inability to act or paralysis (I’ve run across quite a few articles that compare this piece to Hamlet…Prufrock also refers to the Prince of Denmark).

3.       Eliot’s tone is rather gloomy, and at times, the narrator sounds regretful. Some examples of this pessimistic tone include:

·         “Let us go then, you and I,           /When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table;” (Drugged patients aren’t a very cheerful way to describe something)

·         “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;/I know the voices dying with a dying fall/Beneath the music from a farther room.”

·         “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/Till human voices wake us, and we drown.”

4.       Literary elements included in the poem:

·         Metaphor: “The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,/The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes/Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,/Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,/Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,/Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,/And seeing that it was a soft October night,/Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.”

·         Simile: “When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table”

·         Personification: “The muttering retreats/Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels”

·         Symbolism: “With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—” (Used as a symbol of his age)

·         Personification: “And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!/Smoothed by long fingers,/Asleep … tired … or it malingers,/Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.”

·         Rhetorical Question: “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”

·         Allusion: Prufrock alludes to Hamlet, as he also suffers from the inability to act—“No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be…”

·         Imagery: “I have seen [the mermaids] riding seaward on the waves/Combing the white hair of the waves blown back/When the wind blows the water white and black.”

·         Synecdoche: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” (Meaning he would have been better off as a crab)

1.       Some examples of direct characterization include the points where he describes his thinning hair and his coat pulled up to his chin. Much of the poem is an indirect characterization, describing Prufrock’s regrets, paralysis, etc. Eliot most likely uses both approaches because Prufrock is narrating this himself, so he wouldn’t give too many direct descriptions of himself, but when he does, it is helpful and necessary to the symbolism. Eliot’s use of both techniques is essential to Prufrock’s character, making him more realistic and gives him depth.

2.       Eliot mainly focuses on Prufrock, and his diction and syntax don’t really change as he focuses on other people.

3.       Prufrock doesn’t seem to change throughout the poem, so I suppose he is static. He does mention aging, but character-wise, the poem doesn’t seem to identify any changes…

4.       At first, I was prepared to say that I had simply read a character and didn’t get to know Prufrock very well. However, as I read the work over and over, and as I found others’ interpretations of Eliot’s symbols and allusions, I felt much more like I knew Prufrock as a person.

Yegeres Sareit--Arto Tuncboyacian

Here we are, nearly at finals week already! This is the second to last time we'll have to conquer this mountain, at least in high school...There will be plenty of finals in college, but still. Anyway...I was looking through my music trying to find something to go with finals, and I found what seems like a MILLION songs that I could connect to finals or the end of the semester...Did you know that you could stretch just about every Metallica song so that it relates to finals? I do, now.
Well, I decided to go with something different. "Yegeres Sareit", or "Welcome to Your Mountain" is by Arto Tuncboyacian, one of my very favorite musicians. Finals are our mountain--welcome to it. Get up and over it. Certainly, our mountain isn't the same as the mountain in the song (it comes from a soundtrack Arto did for a French movie about an Armenian man returning to his homeland, and the mountain is of course Mount Ararat, the mountain considered holy by Armenians...alright, though it is interesting, I don't think the history lesson is necessary), but it is still a great song (you can't find English lyrics ANYWHERE!) and you can make it apply. "Yegeres Sareit (Welcome to Your Mountain)" by Arto Tuncboyacian, off of the soundtrack for Le Voyage en Armenie.

Thinking Outside the Box

In Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, “No Exit,” existentialist philosophy is key; the theme is “hell is other people.” This idea implies that other people are the basis of our limitations of our thinking. Certainly, people can do and think as they please and create their own personal sense of reality, but they will allow other people to limit them. As for Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Plato seems to feel that the limitations of our thoughts are only natural and uncontrollable, yet it is completely up to us, ourselves, to break free of these boundaries. It is our choice to abandon our caves (our natural ignorance), and also our choice to stay outside in the sunshine of enlightenment. Instead of other people being the source of our limits, our limits are uncontrollable and we are in charge of overcoming them. Both philosophers seem to other rather simple-sounding solutions. Plato offers the solution of leaving the cave of your own free will, turning your face to the sun and allowing your eyes to acclimate to a new reality of insight. Sartre’s solution could be as simple as not allowing other people to become hell for you, seeing as you have the ability to frame your own sense of reality.

Both pieces make use of extended metaphor, and you can say that both are examples of allegory (alright, it is pretty much a given when you look at Plato’s work). The storylines themselves are metaphorical, and many of the actions/objects/ideas within them are symbolic as well. The main extended metaphors were Plato’s cave and Sartres’ hell (that room with the offensive style of furniture).  These objects, these places, became characters within the pieces. All that the cave dwellers/prisoners have, and all that Garcin, Inez, and Estelle have is the space that they dwell within. It is constantly present, physically and within their minds (except for when the cave dwellers free themselves; then their lives become so much more). Eh, I apologize if this little analysis isn’t quite up to snuff. It’s been a busy week for procrastinators everywhere, I’m sure.

1984--Literature Analysis, Character Questions

Whoops, sorry everybody (is anyone actually reading this part of the blog?). It seems that I forgot to put up the second half of my lit analysis yesterday. I kept putting it off so I could fix a few questions and...well, hey, this is starting to sound like an excuse. Here we go:

1.       Direct Characterization:

·         “In the ramifications of Party doctrine [Julia] had not the faintest interest.”

·         “[Winston] moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagerness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the Party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.”

Indirect Characterization:

·          Eh, well this is awkward. Most of the book is blatant, direct characterization (as it goes along with the tone of the book). I feel like I can't find a good example without rereading the whole book. So...yes.

         

2. I'd have to say no. Orwell's style, his syntax, his diction--I can't say I noted a change as he spoke of different characters...He described them all in a straightforward, almost joyless manner (again, the tone!), and describes many of the same aspects/characteristics at first mention.

3.  Winston Smith is a dynamic character. He began the book as a tentative rebel against the Party, met Julia and become a more outright rebel, then ended up “reintegrated” back into society so that he loved the Party, Ingsoc, and Big Brother, and was apathetic towards Julia.

4. In the case of Winston Smith, I feel that I have met a person. (Not so much Julia, though.) I got to know him well throughout the book, and he seems rather easy to relate to (I'm guessing most of us feel like a rebel against the norm at least one time or another in our lifetimes).

1984--Literature Analysis, General Questions

1.       1984 is a dystopian story about a man named Winston Smith, who is living in nightmarish society that seems to reflect our own more and more every day. The government is over controlling and numbs all of the public of Oceania, the world power that was once Europe. The totalitarian government controls the people with propaganda, fear and, basically, hypnotism (we all know that “Big Brother is watching you,” phrase from the posters). Winston works in the records department of the “Ministry of Truth;” however, one day, he begins his silent resistance by recording some of his rebellious thoughts in a little (illegal) diary. His resistance is joined by a fiery rebel named Julia, who he falls in love with; to paraphrase the Muse song I posted a little while ago, “love is their resistance.” Together, in their little hideaways out of the prying telescreen’s view, they begin to question the system in place (“Ingsoc”—English Socialism), eventually meeting up with the mysterious O’Brien as their interest in the rebel group, the Brotherhood, develops. Sadly, the Thought Police catches Winston and Julia—they are tortured (it turns out O’Brien was behind his torture) and “reintegrated” before being released back into their dreadful society. ..Later on, Winston is taken back to be tortured, but he cries out, “Do it to Julia!” (the torture involved his greatest fear: rats) Winston is released again, loving Big Brother just like the rest of them.

2.       After studying bits and pieces of this novel in English classes over the past four years, I’ve heard quite a few excellent themes, but I’ll just stick with rebellion and resistance. (I feel like I say that same thing every time I’m asked to write about a story’s theme.) 1984 is a story of rebellion. Winston rebels against the system with his journal, he rebels with his brief memories of the past, with his constant questioning in his mind. When he meets Julia, as mentioned before, their love, their meetings—those become acts of rebellion. Even Julia’s sexuality was her rebellion (her first and main form of resistance): “You’re only a rebel from the waist downwards.” (Woah, there Winston.) Everything the two did was in the interest of revolution.

3.       Orwell’s tone in 1984 is not terribly ornate or fancy, which reflects the dreary and utterly austere plot and setting of the story.

Examples include:

·         “The hallway smelt of boiling cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a colored poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a meter wide…” [Book one/chapter one/pg. 1]

·         “He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin, he did not know with any certainty that it was 1984.” [Book one/chapter one/pg. 6]

·         “He walked on. The bomb had demolished a group of houses two hundred meters up the street…Apart from the bloody stump, the hand was so completely whitened as to resemble a plaster cast./He kicked the thing into the gutter, and then, to avoid the crowd, turned down a side street to the right. Within three or four minutes he was out of the area which the bomb had affected, the sordid swarming life of the streets was going on as though nothing had happened.” [Book one/chapter eight/pg. 84]

4.             The glass paperweight that Winston bought in Mr. Carrington’s shop is a symbol of the past; something that has no basis in reality during Winston’s time. The picture of the church and the accompanying tune that Mr. Carrington and a couple of other characters knew also seemed to be symbolic of another time.

Flashbacks were also employed within the plot as Winston remembered and dreamt of his childhood; the regime might try to erase the past but they couldn’t erase the torturous memories that Winston held onto.

Winston dreams that he will meet O’Brien in “the place where there is no darkness.”  This concept serves a couple of different purposes in the novel. It is foreshadowing—Winston does end up in that place with O’Brien—but it is also a source of irony—that place where there is no darkness is not what it sounds like it would be.

Julia’s red Junior Anti-Sex League sash is meant as a symbol of her devotion to the Party’s causes, though she practices quite the opposite. I read somewhere that it becomes a symbol of Julia’s duality, and frankly, I just really like the way that was worded. Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Winston’s memories of his mother seem to be representative of his feelings of guilt. This becomes very evident starting with his memory of stealing his baby sister’s last bit of chocolate as a child, right before his mother and sister vanished.

The backwards ways of the Party were all great examples of irony: “War is peace/Freedom is slavery/Ignorance is strength.” Endless wars against a common enemy kept people comfortable and together.  Big Brother was also ironic; his presence was supposed to intimidate you, yet also comfort you. He was your Big Brother, why would he want anything but to take care of you?