The popular view of J. Alfred Prufrock is that of a man trapped in a private hell of indecision and cowardice. More spacious dictionaries even list a pejorative adjective deriving from his name. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, for example, has an entry for Prufrockian: “Resembling or characteristic of the timid, passive Prufrock and his world of middle-class conformity and unfulfilled aspirations.” Wiktionary defines the word (with less specificity but more utility) as, “marked by weariness, regret, embarrassment and longing.” It is an inevitable reading. The “decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse,” the dithering on the stairs (how easily one imagines that poor Prufrock, retreating from an insult, is waylaid by an exasperating spell of esprit de l'escalier) and the seemingly conclusive nod to the Prince of incertitude, Hamlet, which Prufrock’s denial only serves to accentuate. But is all this as final and definitive as it seems? Arguably, the most pitiful aspect of a personal defect is one’s own ignorance of that defect. Indeed, for some problems of character, such as delusion, ignorance seems to be a necessary condition. A man who says to his psychiatrist, “I am delusional” is probably not delusional or is, at least, on the road to recovery. “The first step to wisdom is getting things by their right names,” teaches a Chinese proverb. And then one recalls, too, that the imperative Know thyself was an aphorism among the ancient Greeks—promiscuously attributed to Socrates, Pythagoras, Thales and at least nine other sages. This is not to say that Prufrock is not a coward because he knows he is a coward or that he is not ineffectual because he knows he is ineffectual. But there is something to be said for the unflinching, rheumy-eyed gaze he fixes upon himself in the poem. [1] It is paradoxical but Prufrock shows great courage in confronting his great cowardice, great resolution in confronting his great irresolution. And then those last beautiful lines he utters of mermaids that comb the white hair of the waves blown back when the wind blows the water white and black. He is like a man slumped at the bottom of a pit who has just stood up and begun to feel along the stony wall for his first handgrip. His situation is miserable. That is true. But one is left feeling that there is hope for Prufrock.
[1] In this sense it is Prufrock’s own fierce eye that most renders Prufrock, “formulated, sprawling on a pin—pinned and wriggling on the wall.”