Willard and Prufrock

The other day in class we analyzed T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, essentially reading through the poem and trying to figure what we thought to be the “so what” idea of both the seven separate sections that we split the poem up into and as a whole. At the same time, we have also been extensively studying Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and delving deep into so many of Anderson’s underlying themes in his “novel” of sorts. By now, it’s almost impossible not to see how many similar motifs, themes, and ideas that are present in Eliot’s poem appear also in Anderson’s work. One of the most introspective themes that is present between the two writings is that of the reflection of the passage of time. In Eliot’s poem, it is toward the end with the speaker reflecting back of his life and saying “And would it have been worth it, after all/would it have been worthwhile/after the sunsets and dooryard and the sprinkled streets/after the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor-/and this, and so much more?” (lines 99-103). Here the aging speaker looks back on all the various aspects of his life, from the awe-inspiring sunsets to noticing what a girl was wearing, and wondering whether or not his life has had any true meaning to it. He ponders whether he spent all his long years to the fullest extent, or would it have been worth it to have done so much more instead. Likewise, a similar thought process pains George Willard, the young protagonist of Anderson’s work, who in “Sophistication” starts asking many of the same questions as J. Alfred Prufrock. Still recovering from the death of his mother, George traverses the street of the eponymous town of Ohio and ponders about his place in the world with the passing of time and, “for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing…countless figures of men who…disappeared into nothingness…with a little gasp he sees himself as merely a leaf blown by the wind through the streets of his village” (239). In this moment George breaks free of the mold of childhood that he has been for the whole book and must finally face up to one of the harshest truths of adulthood.  He looks at everyone else that has born, lived, and died, and realizes he is no different than any of them and destined to suffer the same fate.  Like Prufrock in Eliot’s work, George must look at the progression of time, though not in retrospect and hindsight like the old man of the poem, but in fear in apprehension of how he is going to spend the rest of his life and what the future may have in store for him. He knows that unless he makes the right decisions throughout his life, then he will suffer the same fate of becoming a “grotesque”, one who is but a haunting shadow of who they once were as a result of discovering some inner truth about themselves that they embrace all too easily and quickly. Both George and Prufrock suffer from the same ailment of the progression of time, with J. Alfred Prufrock weary of how he has spent up his entire life and whether or not it has all been worth doing, and George Willard who is apprehensive about what the progression of time could possibly have in store for him.