In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot writes the devastating sentence, “It is impossible to say just what I mean,” which has been referenced relentlessly as the thesis of modernism. Although William Faulkner’s writing exhibited a wide array of themes, his vastly variant pieces interminably reiterate Eliot’s claim; complex, profound, and exquisite as their thoughts and emotions often are, Faulkner’s characters consistently fail to express themselves adequately. With this pattern, Faulkner hints at the very nature of writing and at what may be his greatest struggle, that of communicating his ideas to others on paper.
Perhaps most directly, the family of characters rendered in The Sound and the Fury is burdened by each son’s communicative shortcomings. In the first chapter, Benjy mistakes the Burgess girl for his sister Caddy, and his attempt to hug her is construed as an attack. Benjy describes the scene thusly: “They came on. I opened the gate and they stopped, turning. I was trying to say, and I caught her, trying to say, and she screamed and I was trying to say and trying and the bright shapes began to stop and I tried to get out” (SAF 53). He attempts to speak, to explain himself, at least four times, but his mental disabilities make it impossible for him to say anything at all and trap his true intentions inside of him. By showing his readers Benjy’s punishment for the seeming attack—castration—Faulkner displays the emasculating and perhaps dehumanizing powerlessness that results from unsuccessfully translating thought into words. Furthermore, as the first example, Benjy’s incapacity is so strong that he disconnects words from speech, which Faulkner illustrates through his punctuation. With “‘Hush, Benjy.’ Caddy...
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...acters who cannot speak their minds to communicate nonverbally, such as with Cash’s audible response to Darl’s silent thought (AILD 144) and Darl and Dewey Dell’s unspoken conversation about Addie’s imminent death (AILD 27) in As I Lay Dying. However, even then there is uncertainty, and the stream-of-consciousness style of parts of that novel and The Sound and the Fury reflect Faulkner’s fixation on the process of developing words and explanation. In “Spotted Horses,” the men characters watch Eck as he is motionless: “Watching him, they could almost see him visibly gathering and arranging words, speech” (PF 339). This is what Faulkner and his characters do throughout his works: personify the human need to organize the mind to gather and arrange words—a goal that cannot be achieved perfectly; however, to Faulkner, it can be approached and therefore must be attempted.
Throughout Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” the reader acknowledges that the protagonist Sarty exhibits an intuitive sense of
William Faulkner presents various voices of the Old South in his Yoknapatawpha novel, Light in August. This novel not only displays the literary dialogues of different characters, but it also underlies a multiplicity of voices: each in confrontation with another. This confrontation gives the reader an insight into the different opinions of characters; thus, we also hear the voice of the reader who gives his own opinion. This novel is also in dialogue with other texts. These voices are interwoven highlighting the complexity of Faulkner’s novel. Light in August is a masterpiece for combining these conflicting voices of the south. This conflict is not the conflict of this novel only but of the whole era. Dialogism is what gives this play its strength and unity and plays an important role in the stylistic dimension of the novel. This essay is to explore the dialogic features of Light in August in five distinctive perspectives: dialogism at the level of individual characters, the intertextual relationship between this novel and other texts, primarily the Bible, the dialogic relationship in the structure of the novel, and the dialogic relationship between the author and the reader.
William Faulkner was a well-esteemed author of the 20th century who used many literary techniques to display messages in his writings. In his short story, A Rose for Emily, he used literary tools such as point of view, physical plot structure, and symbolism to develop his theme that the past is always wound into the present.
Authors use unreliable narrators not to give more information to the reader, but to withhold information in order to further character development. William Faulkner uses multiple narrators throughout The Sound and the Fury to depict the life of Caddy Compson without telling the story from her point-of-view. Benjy, a mentally disabled 33 year old, Quentin, a troubled and suicidal Harvard student, and Jason, a racist and greedy man, each give their drastically different sides of Caddy’s story to create an incomplete chronicle of her life. Faulkner’s first chapter explores Caddy’s life through the silent narrator, Benjy. As a result of Benjy’s inability to talk, much of how he describes the world is through his heightened sensory awareness.
T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 2. ed. M. H. Abrams New York, London: Norton, 1993.
In his poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T.S. Eliot subtly conveys a wide variety of Prufrock’s emotions; he creates pathos for the speaker by employing the “objective correlative,” which Eliot defines as “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events [that] shall be the formula of that particular emotion” (“Hamlet and His Problems”).
Utilizing adverbs such as “tremulous” to amplify “shake” and “violently” to amplify “move” create a perceivable image of interaction; here, the violent move is not truly an actual motion, rather, it is a physical manifestation of the intangible mental shock that the narrator experiences. However, it is important to note that, to the narrator, the most physically shocking and moving thing in this interaction was not the “finger” of this stranger, but the tone, the intangible abstraction of the “solemn admonition” in the “low whisper”. This abstraction had the electrical current of a “galvanic battery” to “shock” the non-physical soul of the protagonist. The complexity of this excerpt is seen through the multiple dependent clauses, lists of adjectives, and conjunctions; this complex and “serious” style is what Allen Tate, in his essay found in “Modern Criticism”, believes “makes the reading of more than one story an almost insuperable task” (Foster 389). However, this failed criticism does not truly comment on the Poe’s style, but rather, comments on the reader’s interpretation. This style doesn’t create an insuperable task of reading, but rather creates a gradually intensifying sense of Poe’s methodical complexity that incentivizes the reader to keep reading, while providing specific ambiguities through indirect concretizations like the aforementioned “shock” to
T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” tells the speaker’s story through several literary devices, allowing the reader to analyze the poem through symbolism, character qualities, and allusions that the work displays. In this way, the reader clearly sees the hopelessness and apathy that the speaker has towards his future. John Steven Childs sums it up well in saying Prufrock’s “chronic indecision blocks him from some important action” (Childs). Each literary device- symbolism, character, and allusion- supports this description. Ultimately, the premise of the poem is Prufrock second guessing himself to no end over talking to a woman, but this issue represents all forms of insecurity and inactivity.
The Modernist era of poetry, like all reactionary movements, was directed, influenced, and determined by the events preceding it. The gradual shift away from the romanticized writing of the Victorian Era served as a litmus test for the values, and the shape of poetry to come. Adopting this same idea, William Carlos Williams concentrated his poetry in redirecting the course of Modernist writing, continuing a break from the past in more ways than he saw being done, particularly by T.S. Eliot, an American born poet living abroad. Eliot’s monumental poem, The Waste Land, was a historically rooted, worldly conscious work that was brought on by the effects of World War One. The implementation of literary allusions versus imagination was one point that Williams attacked Eliot over, but was Williams completely in stride with his own guidelines? Looking closely at Williams’s reactionary poem to The Waste Land, Spring and All, we can question whether or not he followed the expectations he anticipated of Modernist work; the attempts to construct new art in the midst of a world undergoing sweeping changes.
T.S. Eliot has been one of the most daring innovators of twentieth-century poetry. His poem“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, is different and unusual. He rejects the logic connection, thus, his poems lack logic interpretation. He himself justifies himself by saying: he wrote it to want it to be difficult. The dissociation of sensibility, on the contrary, arouses the emotion of readers immediately. This poem contains Prufrock’ s love affairs. But it is more than that. It is actually only the narration of Prufrock, a middle-aged man, and a romantic aesthete , who is bored with his meaningless life and driven to despair because he wished but
“In Tradition and the Individual Talent”, T.S. Eliot affirms that the greatest writers are those who are conscious of the writers who came before, as if they write with a sense of continuity. T.S Eliot addresses literary tradition as well as poetic tradition, and states that it is important to focus on “significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet” (18). In this sense, the importance of tradition in poetry relies on the fact that a poet must be aware of the achievements of his predecessors, for, as we shall see in the case of Stevens and Ashbery, “the emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless...
Gault, Cinda. "The Two Addies: Maternity and Language in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying
T.S. Eliot was a poet, dramatist and he was also a literary critic. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The...
The absence of a complete identity and the inability be whole is what creates a line between The Love song of J Alfred Prufrock with Eliot’s other poems The Hollow Men and Portrait of a Lady. These poems work together using imagery and characters to highlight the darkness that was weighting down most people after the First World War was finished.
...required a reinvention of poetics and the very use and meaning of language. Since the modern period is said to extend to this day (it's debated whether it's post-modern or not, since both elements survive), any final say on the matter is difficult. What can be said is that Eliot's poetry, as misinterpreted, misread, and misunderstood as it may be, is a quintessential cornerstone in modernist thought, a fragment in the puzzle, which may yield an emergent whole, though it may not be fully grasped.