Although James Joyce's realistic short story "The Dead" and TS Eliot's mock epic poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" both describe a climate of inarticulation and conscious emotional division, the protagonists of each work depriving themselves of 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 bog him in a prison as static as his repetitive, symmetrical stanzas. Both of these features of modernist literature critique the spiritual desiccation of the early twentieth century, and, unsurprisingly, 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 should not be banned"?Get the original essayIreland's voluntary removal is one of the clearest 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 become obsolete for Gabriel, cements his status as a "West Brit ", and not a patriotic Irishman: "And why are you going to France and Belgium, said Miss Ivors, instead of visiting your own country? Well, says Gabriel, it's partly to stay in touch with languages ​​and partly for a change. And don't you have your own language? keep 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 disconnect from with her people (later capitalized by Miss Ivors as she shouts a goodbye in Gaelic, "Beannacht libh", in her final verbal jab at Gabriel); indeed, music and song, two highly mnemonic cultural elements; , are elements foreign to his ears throughout the short story: "Gabriel could not listen while Mary Jane played her Academy piece...the piece she played had no melody to it" ( 2014). His domain is speech, a much less memorable and emotional medium than music, but even his poetic allusions, he fears, will fall flat and exaggerate his intellectual separation from the other guests: "He was undecided about the Robert Browning's lines because he feared they would be over the heads of his listeners. A quote they might recognize from Shakespeare or The Songs would be better... He had taken a bad tone" (2010). The bad tone comes not only from the ostentatious reference, but also from the actual topicality of the speech, transitive adjectives and verbs over octaves and tonal variations Even in an old love letter, he acknowledges the relative pallor of language: “Why do words like these seem so boring and cold to me? Is it because there is no word tender enough to be your name?" (2030) The muffled but persistent music is the untapped reservoir of the memory of the characters of "The Dead", even if for Gabriel its words must suffice for harmony: “Like distant music, these words that he had written years before were brought to him from the past” (2030). “Mr. Browne could go back even further, to the old Italian companies that came to Dublin... Those were the days,” he says, “when there was something like singing being heard in Dublin” (. 2022).of music in today's Dublin gives a glimpse of the emotional coldness that reigns over the city and its inhabitants. It is an old Irish ballad, The Lass of Aughrim, which triggers the reminiscence of a childhood love for Gabriel's wife, Gretta. The association of music with vitality is explained in his recollection: “He was going to study singing purely for his health. He had a very good voice, poor Michael Furey" (2034). Gabriel's inability to connect at this sonic level is illustrated by one of his literary critiques, recalled just before Aunt Julia restored his youth through the song: “We have the impression of listening to music tormented by thought” (2018). thought-tormented music is for Gabriel, it is no match for Prufrock's thought-tormented conscience. His mental journeys are as fractured and non-linear as the “Streets that follow one another like a tedious argument/Of insidious intent” (8-9). The irregular metrical pattern sometimes oscillating between tetrameter and hexameter, each missing a half beat, sometimes does not imitate his confused vision of the "decisions and revisions of the future that a minute will reverse" (48). Even the bravado of the first sentence, “Let's go then, you and I,” is false in its assertion of a “so” in Prufrock's world. Repetition is a byword for Prufrock, from the nearly identical lines that describe his emasculated, passive, feline self-image of "The yellow fog that rubs its back on the window panes, / The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window panes" , to the two symmetrical stanzas which begin with “And would it have been worth it, after all” and end with “It’s not that at all” (15-16; 87/99, 98/110). He manages to spend several “restless nights in cheap one-night hotels” (6). The body parts of his object of desire, traditionally unique details that the poet savors, are also conflated in an automaton-like intonation that leads the reader to question Prufrock's passionate potential: "And I I have already known eyes, I have known them all /...And I have already known weapons, I have known them all" (55, 62). Eliot's insistence on beginning so many lines with the word "And" is not lazy poetry but rather an indictment of Prufrock's use of the conjunction which never incites action but always poses another conscious question: "And how should I presume ? " (61) His presumptions are his disastrous and worrying conceptions of a future rife with internal debates over the smallest questions: "Should I part my hair at the back? Do I dare eat a peach? (122) His hair concerns him greatly as an outward sign of aging that disrupts his conscious attempts to block time: "It's time to turn around and go down the stairs, / With a bald spot in the middle of my hair / (They will say, 'How his hair is getting lighter!')" (39-41). Even his decision to part his hair is an attempt to reverse time, a return to that earlier battle at the bottom of the stairs, a a little further from his recitative confession of a death that he will fight pathetically by appropriating a youthful style: "I'm getting older...I'm getting older.../I'll ​​wear the bottom of my pants rolled up" (120-1). . Prufrock's frightening sequence in the march of time is "evenings, mornings, afternoons"; it ends not in death but in delay, not in a crash but in a groan. Just as Prufrock retreats into the safe confines of his mind, Gabriel shelters in cramped quarters that oppose the notion of an expansive past: "'Listening -night to the names of all those great singers of the past, he seemed to me, I must admit, that we were living in an eraless spacious, those days could, without exaggeration, be called spacious days" (2024). On the other hand, Gabriel's previous positions were confined, as in the small pantry, where even his coat conceals a certain frigidity of the outside: “…a cold, fragrant air from outside escaped from the crevices and folds” (2009) It is in these situations that Gabriel cannot reconcile past and present as he remembers; of Lily as a child, "nursing a rag doll", the artificial light from the "gas in the pantry made her look even paler", and Gabriel's attempt to recall this connection by looking to the future backfired "Oh, then," said Gabriel cheerfully, "I suppose we'll go to your wedding one of these nice days with your young man, eh. The girl glanced over her shoulder at him and said with a big smile?" bitterness: The men who are now, is that all? palaver and what they can get out of you” (2009).Gabriel leaves the pantry at the end of the party in the same way as he did there. entered: “Gabriel came forward from the little pantry, struggling in his overcoat” (2026). The past is also projected by a soft, natural light, what Gabriel calls in his regeneration phase: "'We don't want light. We have enough light from the street. And I say, he added in pointing to the candle, you could remove this beautiful article, like a good man'" (2031). The "ghostly light of the street lamp", which exposes Gretta's beauty to Gabriel, is further celebrated by Joyce as a mixture of past and present: "Her own identity was fading into a gray and impalpable world: the solid world itself in which these dead had once grown and lived was dissolving and diminishing” (2031, 2035). The words chosen by Joyce reflect the darkness that paints Gabriel's existence: "A shadow passed over his face... He remained motionless in the darkness of the room... A dull anger began to gather again in the depths of his mind and the dull fires of his lust began to burn with anger in his veins” (2014, 2028, 2033). Gretta, for her part, is literally illuminated by her memory of ghostly things of the past, the personification of chiaroscuro: "Her blue felt hat would show the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark sides of her skirt would highlight clearest values. " (2028). For Gabriel, a union of past and present is untenable, and it constitutes an obstacle for the future: "...there are always in gatherings like this sadder thoughts which will return to our mind: thoughts of the past, youth, changes, the absent faces that we miss here this evening. Our path in life is strewn with many sad memories: and if we always pondered them, we would not find the heart to move forward courageously. with our work among the living...Therefore, I will not dwell on the past” (2024-25). Gabriel does not realize that without dwelling on the dead, the living become walking corpses. His good-natured request after carving the succulent goose at dinner “please forget my existence, ladies and gentlemen, for a few minutes” has more existential weight than he intends (2020). The talk about monks sleeping in coffins intrigues the table for a moment, then turns deadly by reminding them of their own mortality: “The coffin,” said Mary Jane, “is intended to remind them of their final end. As the subject had become gloomy, it was buried in table silence” (2023). Death eclipses even their platitudes: “I admit that they did it,” says Gabriel, “but they forget that my wife here takes three mortal hours to get dressed” (2009). The only time Gabriel initiates the ritualrevival of the music, the song is the repetitive "For They're Merry Gay Guys", which inadvertently highlights Gabriel's self-indulgent speech: "Unless he tell a lie/Unless he tell a lie” (2025). Prufrock certainly evokes the past by allusion, but it is only to ironically compare his minimized ego to heroic figures. The opening wager, a reference to Dante's Inferno, is an example of one character fearlessly confronting another, an opposition to the "sedentary flame [which] would remain without further movement" (p. 2140, note by footer 2). Michelangelo's opening stanza and first refrain form a sonnet, but a sonnet by J. Alfred Prufrock with the absurd name, an effeminate name suggesting a "prudish" in "dress." His anthropomorphic and nebulous cat, driven by the winds, passively “lets the soot falling 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 balmy October night,/curled once around 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 would say, misogynistic) world that Prufrock inhabits where his love will "prepare a face to meet.” the faces you meet;/ There will be time to murder and create,/ And time for all the works and all the days of the hands/ That raise and lay a question on your plate” (27-30). The practice and knowledge of art now nourishes social postures, both metaphorically and physically, and large pieces collapse under this weight. Perhaps Prufrock's most contradictory allusion is to another great work, Hamlet, with which he 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 lord servant,” he says to himself, and the absence of a personal pronoun encourages us to consider his absent ego (112). As an advisor, he believes he is capable of “inflating progress, initiating one”. scene or two,” but it is precisely this dramaturgical initiative that is missing from his personality (113). His string of adjectives about himself is interrupted by caesuras which amplify the intermittent rhythm of his inert life: "...an easy tool,/ Deferential, happy to be useful,/ Deferential, happy to be useful, / Political, prudent and meticulous” (114-116). Prufrock's allusions inevitably lead to an agonizing possible future where his grandiloquent gestures implode and return to the sleepy present: "And would it have been worth it, after all/...To say: 'I am Lazarus, returned from the dead',/ Come back and tell you everything, I'll tell you everything'/ If someone, placing a pillow near their head,/ were to say: 'That's not at all what I meant./ That's not 'is not that at all'" (87, 94-98). Both “The Dead” and “Prufrock” have window leitmotifs that reinforce their central themes of alienation and nostalgia. Gabriel turns to the window twice, each time motivated by his next speech. The first example is an escapist fantasy that, fittingly, inverts the typical desire to be sheltered from the storm: “Gabriel's warm, trembling fingers tapped the cold window pane. How cool it must be outside! How nice it would be to go out alone. ... How much nicer it would be there than at the table! (2017) His need to escape contrasts with his rather enviable position in a hospitable and festive house: “People, perhaps, stood in the snow on the quay, looking at the lighted windows and listening to the music of the waltz. the air was pure» (2023). The duality of the window watcher looking in and out is complicated in "Prufrock," where everyone, it seems, has the opportunity to peek through a window, real or metaphorical. In addition to Prufrock's quasi-erotic movement against women's windows, Eliot points to the social critique of industrial society that pollutes the atmosphere and pushes men to purify the air and hope for connection: "Shall I say , I crossed narrow passages at dusk. streets/ And watched the smoke rising from the pipes/ Lonely men in shirtsleeves, leaning out of windows? (70-72). The window becomes an occasional focal point when Prufrock's love interest mercilessly ignores his gestures by "putting down a pillow or throwing a shawl,/ and turning to the window he should say:/ 'That's not it at all '" (107-9). . His offbeat gaze is probably turned towards everything that is not Prufrock. In fact, Prufrock is anything but 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 derogatory statement, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/rushing on the bottom of silent seas", not only anticipates his drowning in the face of the alarm of human voices, but indicates his desire for a world voiceless underground (73-4). However, the very alliteration of the “s” in the line testifies to this impossibility. Nor can he join the feminine world of the mermaids, whom he hears from afar "sing each to each./I don't think they will sing to me" (124-125). This communal aspect of life is what Prufrock desperately needs; the last three lines summarize his desire to attach plurality to singularity: “We lingered in the chambers of the sea/By the daughters of the sea wrapped in red and brown algae/Until human voices wake us and we were drowning" (129-131). There was no "we" in the preceding few stanzas; Prufrock was alone on the beach. His "lingering in the chambers of the sea" illustrates his penchant for the delay, and the "human voices" which drown it, associated with Eliot's suddenly laconic verses, remind the reader of the little time he has left "until" his "The Dead", on the other hand, is ends on a rather optimistic note. Gabriel first experiences a flood of universal emotions and a connection with the cyclical qualities of life arising from his fusion of past and present: "Moments of their secret life together burst forth." like stars in his memory... A wave of even more tender joy escaped from his heart and ran in warm waves along his arteries. Like the tender fires of the stars, moments of their shared life... burst forth and illuminated his memory” (2030). His awakening from his current sadness is not entirely positive; his new appreciation for his wife's beauty borders on violence: "He wanted to scream at her with his soul, to crush his body against hers, to overpower her" (2032). Just as artificial light is too garish and cannot match the subtlety of dark light, Joyce also warns against this exuberance. It is only when he is cast away as dead that Gabriel undergoes a revision and spiritual transformation: “A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ridiculous character, acting like a penny for his aunts, a nervous and well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealizing his own clownish lusts, the pitiful idiot he had seen in the mirror. " (2033 -34). Unlike Prufrock, who always considered himself a "fool", Gabriel's recognition is his first step towards achieving the neutrality desired by., 1993.