“The Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock” vs. Winesburg, Ohio

            As I pervade deeper into these two works, keeping in mind the possibilities of similarities and parallelism, I am beginning to see the comparison. When we were discussing the poem in class discussions, I kept thinking, ‘I still don’t understand this poem or how it relates to the work by Sherwood Anderson.’ The frustration and lack of connection slowly unveiled when I started to prepare for the rough draft. As I reread and re-annotated “The Book of the Grotesque”, I had a moment of epiphany, which really made me happy.

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Translation:

"If I but thought that my response were made

to one perhaps returning to the world,

this tongue of flame would cease to flicker.

But since, up from these depths, no one has yet

returned alive, if what I hear is true,

I answer without fear of being shamed.

The beginning of the poem by T.S. Elliot and eight to the last paragraph on the first chapter of Winesburg, Ohio has irrefutable parallelism. On page two of my book, the narrator, speaker, experiences something almost spiritual, “For an hour the procession of grotesques passed before the eyes of the old man, and then, although it was a painful thing to do, he crept out of bed and began to write, Some one of the grotesques had made a deep impression on his mind and he wanted to describe it” (2). Although this quotation is lengthy, I believe it is necessary in order for me to explain what I saw. At 2 AM in the morning, you either tend to imagine things or have moments of realization. The latter happened to me.  The speaker of the poem says that no one will hear his story, which is why he is narrating it to the listener. I believe that this symbolizes Anderson’s message about truth. Just as if the writer were to publish his book, he would become grotesque; the speaker realizes that he will also become a grotesque if his story were to be known to the world. Also, the writer is awoken by ghosts of grotesques who, in a way, persuade him to get up and write about their stories. “Some one of the grotesques”, the one who makes an impression on the old man, can be seen as the narrator of the poem. The narrator had once been a grotesque but the release from Earth allows him to realize the futility of truth and cause him to lament about his experience. Therefore, in my view, Elliot decided to write a personal perspective of a grotesque character by using Alfred Prufrock to parallel one of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio.

However, I am not going to think about which story the poem best fits because I think the poem has many similarities with a handful of the stories in Winesburg, Ohio. The ghostly images, windows, hands, and feeling of frustration are all ubiquitous in both literary works. Just as the characters in Winesburg, Ohio wish to retrieve their youthfulness, Prufrock also desires to keep his youth, not fully realizing that he has already lost it. In the end, he has to wake himself from a dream state of mind in order to face his fears and ultimately, await his death.