The False Promise of Being a Main Character…

<p>I adore &ldquo;<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock</a>.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s a canonical mainstay that an English teacher has probably tortured you with, and that teacher might very well have been me.</p> <p>One of my favorite parts of the poem (besides the glorious sibilance of &ldquo;scuttling across the floor of silent seas&rdquo; or the oft-quoted line about the coffee spoons) is the following stanza:</p> <blockquote> <p><em>No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;</em></p> <p><em>Am an attendant lord, one that will do</em></p> <p><em>To swell a progress, start a scene or two,</em></p> <p><em>Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,</em></p> <p><em>Deferential, glad to be of use,</em></p> <p><em>Politic, cautious, and meticulous;</em></p> <p><em>Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;</em></p> <p><em>At times, indeed, almost ridiculous &mdash;</em></p> <p><em>Almost, at times, the Fool.</em></p> </blockquote> <p>Any professor worth their salt will teach about how this stanza is rife with the poem&rsquo;s themes of alienation, desire, anxiety, and disappointment. Sound familiar?</p> <p>They don&rsquo;t call Eliot&rsquo;s cadre &ldquo;Modernists&rdquo; for nothing. It&rsquo;s easy to imagine Eliot alive today, reading our current headlines.</p> <p>If this were written today, we might interpret this stanza as Prufrock&rsquo;s disappointment that he&rsquo;s not a Main Character, a term much bandied about. Instead of a Prince, Prufrock worries, what if I&rsquo;m only there to start&nbsp;<em>someone else&rsquo;s</em>&nbsp;scene? The words he dwells on, &ldquo;politic, cautious, and meticulous,&rdquo; are the words of (dreaded) bureaucracy.</p> <p><a href="https://nicole-d-peeler.medium.com/the-false-promise-of-being-a-main-character-5513e1e4efd6"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>