Although James Joyce's realist short story "The Dead" and T. S. Eliot's mock-epic poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" both describe a climate of self-conscious inarticulation and emotional division, the protagonists of each work denying themselves the pleasures of the present by refusing to integrate different times into their lives. The alienated Gabriel obscures the past and its shadows in "The Dead," and the insecure Prufrock's anticipatory nightmares mire him in a prison as static as its repetitive, symmetrical rooms. These two hallmarks of modernist literature critique the spiritual drying up of the early twentieth century, and, not coincidentally, it is the temporal movement of regression toward better times, not progression toward an unknown future, that rejuvenates Gabriel and drowns Prufrock. Say no to plagiarism. . Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The intentional displacement from Ireland is one of the most explicit signs of Gabriel's separation from the past. His conversation with Molly Ivors at his aunts' annual Christmas party, a liminal event that looks to the future while remembering the past, but which has grown stale for Gabriel cements his status as a "Western Briton", not a patriotic Irishman:" And why do you go to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own country? Well, said Gabriel, it is partly to keep in touch with the languages ​​and partly to change stay in touch with Irish? asked Miss Ivors. Well, said Gabriel, if it comes to that, you know, Irish is not my language" (2016). Gabriel's position as an outsider is amplified by his linguistic disconnection from his people. (later capitalized by Miss Ivors as she shouts a farewell in Gaelic, "Beannacht libh", in her final verbal jab at Gabriel); indeed, music and singing, two highly mnemonic cultural essentials, are elements foreign to his ears throughout the novella: "Gabriel could not listen as Mary Jane played her Academy piece... the piece she was playing had no melody for him" (2014). His domain is the spoken word, a medium far less memorable and emotional than music, but he fears that even his poetic allusions might fall flat and exaggerate his intellectual separation from the other guests: "He was hesitant about Robert Browning's verses because he feared they would above the heads of his listeners. It would be better to have some quotation that they could recognize from Shakespeare or the Melodies... He had adopted the wrong tone" (2010). The wrong tone lies not only in ostentatious reference, but in the actual currency of speech, in adjectives and transitive verbs across octaves, and in tonal variations. Even in an old love letter, he recognizes the relative pallor of the language: "Why do words like these seem so dull and cold to me? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?" (2030)The attenuated but persistent music is the unexplored reserve of memory for the characters of "The Dead", although for Gabriel his words must suffice for harmony: "Like distant music these words that he had written years before came to him brought from the past" (2030). Other characters comment on the explicit link between music and memory throughout the piece: "Mr Browne could go back even further, to the old Italian companies that used to come to Dublin...Those were the times, he said, when there was something how to sing to be heard in Dublin" (2022). The absence of music in today's Dublin suggests the emotional coldness that is spreading through the city and its inhabitants. It's an old Irish ballad, The Lass of Aughrim, whichtriggers reminiscences of a childhood love for Gabriel's wife, Gretta. The association of music with vitality is made explicit in his memory: "He would have studied singing just for his health. He had a great voice, poor Michael Furey" (2034). Gabriel's inability to connect at this sonic level is exemplified by one of her literary reviews, remembered shortly before Aunt Julia restores her youth through singing: "You feel that you are listening to music tormented by thoughts" (2018). the thought-torn music is for Gabriel, no match for Prufrock's thought-torn consciousness. His mental paths are fractured and non-linear like the “Roads that follow each other like a tedious argument/ Of treacherous intent” (8-9). The irregular metrical pattern sometimes shifts between tetrameter and hexameter, each missing half a beat, sometimes failing to mimic his hazy vision of the future's "decisions and revisions that one minute will undo" (48). Even the bravado of the opening line “Come on then, you and me” is false in its assertion of a “then” in Prufrock's world. Repetition is a watchword for Prufrock, with nearly identical lines describing his emasculated, passive, feline self-image of “The yellow fog that rubs its back on the window panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its snout on the panes of the windows,” to the two symmetrical stanzas that begin with “And it would have been worth it, after all” and end with “It's not like that at all” (15-16; 87/99, 98/110). He manages to spend more “restless nights in cheap one-night hotels” (6). The body parts of his object of desire, traditionally unique details that the poet relishes, are similarly cast in an automaton-like intonation that makes the reader question Prufrock's potential for passion: "And I have already known the eyes , I have known them all /.. .And I have already known the weapons, I have known them all” (55, 62). Eliot's insistence on starting so many lines with the word "And" is not lazy poetry but , rather, an indictment of Prufrock's use of the conjunction that never incites action but always asks another awkward question: “And how should I presume? ” (61) His presumptions are his ruining and troubling conceptions of a future full of internal debates over the most minute matters: “Should I part my hair in the back? Dare I eat a peach?" (122) His hair is a great concern to him as an outward sign of aging that subverts his conscious attempts to stall: "It's time to go back and go down the stairs, / With a bald patch in the middle of his hair / (They will say: 'How his hair is thinning!')" (39-41). Even her decision to part her hair in parting is an effort to reverse time, a return to this earlier battle down the stairs, one point further from the acting admission of a death she will pathetically fight by appropriating a youthful style: " I'll grow old.../I'll ​​wear the bottom of my pants rolled up" (120-1). Prufrock's scary march of time sequence is "evenings, mornings, afternoons"; it ends not with a death but with a delay, not with an explosion but with a moan. Just as Prufrock retreats within the safe confines of his mind, so Gabriel takes refuge in narrow spaces that resist the notion of an expansive past: "'Listening -night to the names of all those great singers of the past it seemed to me, I must confess, that we lived in a less spacious age those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days" (2024). In contrast, Gabriel's previous positions were confined, as in the small pantry, where even his coat hides a certain frigidity from the outside: "...a cold and perfumed air coming from outside escaped from cracks andfolds" (2009). It is in these situations that Gabriel is unable to reconcile past and present; while he remembers Lily as a child, "nursing a rag doll", the artificial light of the "gas in the pantry made her look even paler" , and Gabriel's attempt to recall that bond by looking into the future backfires: "Oh, then," said Gabriel cheerfully, "I guess one of these fine days we'll come to your wedding with your young man, eh? The girl turned to look at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness: The men who are here now are just all palaver and what they can get from you" (2009).Gabriel leaves the pantry at the end of the party at about the same time way he entered: "Gabriel advanced from the small pantry, laboriously putting on his coat" (2026). The past is projected by a soft and natural light, which Gabriel requires in his regenerative phase: "'We don't need light. . We have enough light from the street. And I say, he added, pointing to the candle, you might remove that beautiful object, like a good man'" (2031) . The "ghostly light of the street lamp", which casts a memorial display on Gretta's beauty for Gabriel to see, is further celebrated by Joyce as a blending of past and present: "His identity was fading into an impalpable gray world: the solid world itself in which these dead had once reared and lived was dissolving and diminishing" (2031, 2035) Joyce's choice words reflect the darkness that paints Gabriel's existence: "A shadow passed over his face... He stood motionless in the darkness of the room... A dull anger began to gather again in the back of the room. his mind and the deaf the fires of his lust began to glow angrily in his veins" (2014, 2028, 2033). Gretta, however, is literally illuminated by the memory of ghostly things past, personification of chiaroscuro: "Her felt hat blue would highlight the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would highlight the light ones." " (2028). For Gabriel, the union of the past and the present is unsustainable and represents an obstacle to the future: "...there are always in meetings like this sadder thoughts that recur to our mind: thoughts of the past, the youth, the changes, the absent faces that we miss here tonight. Our path through life is strewn with so many sad memories: and if we were to ruminate on them forever, we could not find the courage to move forward courageously. with our work among the living... So I will not dwell on the past" (2024-25). Gabriel is unaware that without dwelling on the dead, the living become walking corpses. His good-natured request after slicing the succulent goose into dinner "kindly forget my existence, ladies and gentlemen, for a few minutes" has more existential weight than it intends (2020) speech about monks sleeping in coffins intrigues the table for a moment, then turns deadly by reminding them of their mortality: "The coffin, said Mary Jane, serves to remind them of their ultimate end. Since the topic had become dismal, it was buried in the silence of the table" (2023). Death overshadows even their banalities: "I will try, they said Gabriel, but they forget that my wife here takes three mortal hours to get dressed" (2009).The only time Gabriel begins the revitalizing ritual of music, the song is the repetitive "For they are jolly gay fellows," which inadvertently highlights Gabriel's pandering speech: "Unless he tells a lie/ Unless I Tell a Lie" (2025). Prufrock recalls the past through allusion, but it is only to ironically compare his downplayed ego to heroic figures. The opening move, a reference to Dante's Inferno, is an example of a characterwho fearlessly faces another, an opposition to the sedentary "flame [that] would remain without further movement" (p. 2140, note 2). Michelangelo's opening stanza and first refrain form a sonnet, but a sonnet of the absurdly named J. Alfred Prufrock, an effeminate name that suggests a "prude" in "cassock." His anthropomorphic and nebulous cat, pushed by the winds, passively “Lets the soot that falls from the chimneys fall on its back” (19). He promises greatness, as do the allusions, as he makes "a sudden leap," but inhibits himself: "seeing that it was a sweet October night, / He huddled once about the house and fell asleep" (21-22). Even the sacred name of Michelangelo, who sculpted the embodiment of the male form, is reduced to superficial chatter in the emasculated and superficial (and, some might add, misogynistic) world that Prufrock inhabits where his love will "prepare a face to meet the faces you meet;/ There will be time to kill and create,/ And time for all the works and days of hands/ That raise and drop a question on your plate" (27-30). The practice and knowledge of art are now fodder for social attitudes, both metaphorically and physically, and great works collapse under this weight. Perhaps Prufrock's most contradictory allusion is to another great play, Hamlet, with which it shares the quality of indecision. This section, written largely in Shakespeare's iambic pentameter, is also thick with puns and other puns. “I am a gentleman on duty,” he defines himself, and the lack of a personal pronoun leads one to consider his ego absent (112). scene or two", but it is precisely this dramaturgical initiative that is missing from his personality (113). The series of adjectives about himself is interrupted by caesuras that amplify the intermittent rhythm of his inert life: "...an easy instrument,/ Deferential, happy to be useful,/ Deferential, happy to be useful,/ Political, cautious and meticulous” (114-116). Prufrock's allusions lead inevitably to a possible restless future where his grandiloquent gestures implode and return to the sleepy present: "And it would have been worth it, after all/...Say, 'I am Lazarus, I am from the dead,/ Come back to tell you everything, I will tell you everything' / If one, placing a pillow near her head, / were to say: 'That's not what I meant at all. / That's not what I meant at all'" (87, 94-98). Both "The Dead" and "Prufrock" have a leitmotif of windows that enhance the central themes of alienation and desire. Gabriel turns to the window twice, both times prompted by his next speech. The first example is an escape fantasy that, appropriately, inverts the typical desire to get out of the storm: "Gabriel's warm, trembling fingers tapped on the cold glass of the window. How cool it must be outside! How pleasant it would be to go out alone." ...How much more pleasant it would be there than at the table!" (2017) His need for escape contrasts with his rather enviable position within a hospitable and festive home: "People, perhaps, stood outside on the quay in the snow, looking at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there" (2023). The duality of the window observer looking in/out is complicated in "Prufrock," where everyone, it seems, has some occasion to look out a window, real or metaphorical. Apart from Prufrock's almost erotic movement against women's glass, Eliot points the finger in social criticism against the industrial society that pollutes the atmosphere and pushes men into clean air and hopes for a connection: "I must say that I passed at dusk through narrow streets/ And watched the smoke rising from the pipes/ Of lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows?" (70-72). The window becomes a casual focal point when loveof Prufrock callously ignores her gestures "arranging a pillow or throwing away a shawl,/ and turning to the window, should say:/ 'It is not so at all'" (107-9) . His shifted gaze is, presumably, towards everything that is not Prufrock. In fact, Prufrock is far from present; he is constantly underwater. Eliot intensifies the motif with the symbolic division between sea and land and the windows that result from their separation. Prufrock's deprecatory statement, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Running across the bottom of silent seas," not only anticipates his drowning at the alarm of human voices, but indicates his longing for a wordless hell (73-4). However, the very alliteration of the "s" in the line reveals this impossibility. Nor can he join the female world of sirens, whom he hears from afar "singing, each for each./ I don't think they'll sing for me" (124-125). This community aspect of life is what Prufrock desperately needs; the last three lines encapsulate his desire to connect plurality to singularity: “We lingered in sea rooms/ By sea girls wreathed with red and brown seaweed/ Till human voices woke us and we drowned” (129-131). There was no "we" in the previous few stanzas; Prufrock was alone on the beach His "lingering in the sea chambers" is illustrative of his propensity for delay, and the "human voices" that drown him, along with Eliot's suddenly terse lines, remind the reader of the short time Prufrock had left "until his". the future enslaves him. “The Dead,” however, ends on a rather optimistic note. Gabriel initially experiences a surge of universal emotions and a connection to the cyclical qualities of life from his merging of the past with the present: "Moments of their secret". life together broke like stars into his memory... An even tenderer wave of joy escaped from his heart and ran in a warm stream along his arteries. Like the tender fires of the stars, moments of their life together...break through and illuminate his memory" (2030). His excitement from his present sadness is not entirely positive; his newfound appreciation for his wife's beauty borders on the violent: “He longed to cry out to her from his soul, to crush his body against hers, to dominate her” (2032) Just as artificial light is too garish and cannot match the subtlety of dark light, so too Joyce puts in. guard against this exuberance to be embraced. Only when he is despised by death, Gabriele undergoes a spiritual revision and transformation: "A shameful consciousness of his own person assails him. He saw himself as a ridiculous figure, behaving like a beggar to his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, speaking to vulgar people and idealizing his own clownish passions, the pitiful and fatuous individual he had glimpsed in the mirror" ( 2033 -34). Unlike Prufrock, who has always considered himself a "Madman", Gabriel's recognition is his first step towards achieving the neutrality desired by Joyce, both artistically and morally. Gabriel, at the beginning, makes a great effort to part with the snow on his person (even though he likes the sight of the cold snow outside the window): "He stood on the carpet, scraping the snow from his galoshes...He kept scratching his feet vigorously" (2009). throughout the narrative “I think Christmas is never really Christmas unless there's snow on the ground,” says a party guest on a blanket that unifies all of Ireland (2029). observes the snowflakes "falling obliquely against the lamplight." "of the past. He accepts that the snow not only covers him, but also the "lonely cemetery where he lay., 1993.