Jay Gatsby and J. Alfred Prufrock are two modern literary protagonists who would probably never be caught dead in the same room together. Although both men of the turn of the century are in love with absolutely unattainable women, their attitudes towards life, the universe and everything could not be more opposite. Gatsby you make a fortune, buy a mansion, throw lavish parties, and completely reinvent himself, taking the flamboyant peacock approach to wooing his girlfriend. Prufrock, on the other hand, reluctantly starts a meeting, hesitates, ponders, withdraws, and ultimately resigns himself to a life of isolation, taking a more unpleasant approach to dating. Yes ladies, sometimes these are your options.
Although Jay and J. Alfred seem to live in separate worlds, chronologically speaking, they are only separated by a decade. In fact, both characters are pioneers of a cultural period that was shortsightedly dubbed “modernism” because of the remote possibility that nothing would change again. With booming cities, huge crowds, a division of labor and a division of wealth suddenly becoming commonplace, people experienced a sense of isolation, dislocation and anonymity unprecedented in the new cultural landscape. On some level, the conflicting romances of Gatsby and Prufrock represent a larger struggle to find their place in the city life of the early 20th century, which is strongly reflected in the way they are narrated.
Jimmy Gatz’s humble upbringing in North Dakota does nothing to prepare him for the flamboyant 1920s urban life that his childhood sweetheart, Daisy, enjoys so much. Her character of “Gatsby” is essentially an elaborate and extended interpretation for the benefit of her and society, so it is logical that we are forced to occupy the audience position by the fact that The Great Gatsby is narrated in the third person. . In the style of a “telephone” (telegram?) Game, an outsider introduces us to Gatsby for the first time, who originally learned about Gatsby through gossip, which people have picked up from friends of friends who might as well have. heard of a passing cart.
Though the rumors work in Gatsby’s favor for a while, it doesn’t take long for posh New Yorkers who break up their parties to realize that he’s not one of their own. Slowly, the narrator discovers the truth of Gatsby’s story: Jay is an uneducated smuggler from a small town, hell-bent on getting the (now married) girl of his dreams back. Highly damaging personal secrets aside, however, we end up with very little sense of what’s going on in Jay’s head, just most Gatsby partygoers have no sense / appreciation for the nice guy. which it really is. By playing the role of a wealthy social elite, the real Gatsby becomes as inaccessible to big city society as he is to himself. It seems like not much has changed since the days of your brother’s strong tree clubhouse.
In a great departure from Gatsby, we get the feeling that Prufrock was born and raised in his rigid bourgeois society, and that nothing could be more suffocating. Although he yearns more than anything to share his feelings with a mysterious, nameless woman, he feels paralyzed by social conventions, ultimately deciding not to say anything to her at all. The first-person narration of “J. Alfred Prufrock’s Love Song” is completely inseparable from Prufrock’s innermost thoughts and feelings, leaving us with almost no objective sense of things around him. Indeed, scholars still cannot agree on whether the poem is about a romantic interlude gone wrong or about an imagined setting whose imaginary failure prompts Prufrock to keep his mouth shut.
By placing an impenetrable barrier between the reader and the external reality of the poem, Prufrock forces us to share his sense of separation from the outside world, which consists of formality, routine, triviality, and lots and lots of tea. Looking through Prufrock’s eyes is like looking through prison bars: virtually everything he describes is segmented into parts, be it “faces you meet,” “hands of the day,” “eyes you meet. set “”.[a]rms that are bracelets, “” long fingers, “” patterned nerves, “or even the interrupted back-and-forth structure of the narrative itself. This grumpy” pair of claws “is torn over how to convey their feelings to a insensitive culture, and it definitely shows in the dismembered bodies around him Prufrock is the depressive maniac Gatsby, though maybe the two of them could bond over a pint, a good cry, and the fact that neither of them gets the girl .
