To Improve or Not to Improve

Liminal Iterations of the Self in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’

Abstract

T.S. Eliot’s 1915 poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ repeatedly registers the need to self-optimize in response to provocations. Yet, the narrator is never able to respond to them in a way that would either improve his personal standing or bring him favorable social recognition. As he never denies the need to improve, the inability transitions into disinterest in the question of improvement itself. This essay argues that the narrator’s (in)ability to support or oppose self-optimization in ‘Prufrock’ indicates a liminal position with respect to the problem, a position in which the self is impassive, indifferent, and perhaps even bored. However, even as this configuration of (in)capacity leading to disinterest is repeatedly brought forth in the poem, it cannot be taken to be ineffectual and pointless. Rather, the apparently endless iteration of the arrangement brings about new possibilities for the imagination of the self—possibilities of the self’s co-existence with contingencies of time, space, and expression.