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浅析T.S.艾略特早期诗歌中的现代人形象 |
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时间：2009-8-8 16:56:54 来源：不详
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s stirring soul, but covers himself under the protection of western civilization. He also lacks human feelings. From the words Prufrock says we know what concerns him most is his own inaction rather than the development of his will and confidence to seek actual love. As the party winds down, we can tell that Prufrock will not be lucky tonight or forever. Although Prufrock knows the woman, and even he knows everything very well, just for the lack of will, what he knows become useless. He is doomed to fail for the part of lack of will and confidence.
(ⅳ) Sensitivity that makes Prufrock behave like a woman
In most people’s opinion, women are usually more sensitive than men. In “Prufrock”, the speaker differs from the common men. He is sensitive like a woman or more sensitive than women. He is too sensitive with his own appearance. When he faces the arms bracelet, white and bare, he would guess that women will say: “But how his arms and legs are so thin.” [12] Prufrock might know too much. He is in deep starvation that exceeds the common starvation. It is unrealistic to satisfy his starvation. Perhaps only after he becomes an animal and returns to the unconscious nature, might he feel a little relaxed: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, (line73) / Scuttling across the floors of silent sea. (line74)” We know the claws have a pair of pin cirrus, and they touch many things. Like the claws, Prufrock could not get rid of such “pin cirrus”, for he lives in such a genteel society and is afraid of failure or just a little frustration that he is always overcautious in doing anything. Prufrock’s nature is timidity, which would enhance his sensitivity. A man who is too sensitive cannot fulfill his dreams, which is reflected clearly from Prufrock.
(ⅴ)Psychosexual anxiety---the very root of Prufrock’s paralysis
Prufrock’s paralysis revolves around his social and sexual anxieties. Prufrock, as a balding, weak, neurotic, effete intellectual, is both baffled and intimidated by women. Perhaps the central image of his anxiety is being “pinned and wriggling on the wall (line58)” under unflinching gaze of women (exacerbated since the women’s eyes, much like their “Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (line63)”, seems eerily disconnected from their bodies). At least here the women seem to be paying attention to him, however hostile they may be. By the end of the poem, Prufrock feels ostracized from the society of women, the “mermaids singing, each to each. (line124)/I do not think that they sing to me (line125)”. Interestingly, the beautiful, vain mermaids comb the “white hair of the waves blown back (line127)”. As hair is a symbol of virility, we can see that Prufrock’s paralysis is deeply rooted in his psychosexual anxiety.
2.2 Gerontion--- a little old man full of hopelessness
2.2.1 The understanding of “Gerontion”
In an unbearably dry day, in a decayed, wind-sieged day, there sits a hopeless little old man, waiting for the rain. Gerontion consists of two morphemes: Geront from Greek and a scornful affix “tion”.[13] Gerontion is not a person but one among many possible incarnations of the meaning of his name in Greek, “little old man.” The little old man who lives in the ruined house in windy space is a reflection of the people in T.S. Eliot’s time: brain-withered in Europe’s war-shattered civilization, longing for salvation.
2.2.2 The features of Gerontion as a character in “Gerontion”
“Gerontion” was written in 1919---about one or two years after the First World War. “Gerontion” marks the growth of despair and disillusionment in the poem that eventually leads up to The Waste Land.[14] In that period, the Western civilization was decaying. The speaker in this poem is a little old man on the verge of death. He lives in a terrible place, throughout his life; he is a mediocre man all the time and accomplishes nothing. Gerontion might be the victim of the First World War. Besides, he is stuffed with his “history”.
“I was neither at hot gates (line3)/Nor fought in the warm rain (line4)/Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass, (line5)/Bitten by flies, fought.(line6)” Gerontion’s mind wanders backward, however, not upward, and then forward through a series of wars that Gerontion feels would have compensated him if he had been there to fight. Here‘hot gate’refers to the battle of Thermopylae in ancient Greece in 480 B.C. He thinks of history as a system of corridors ingeniously contrived to confuse and finally to corrupt the human race. When Gerontion compares himself with the great heroes and compares the things he does with the great events in the history, he finds himself so insignificant that it is impossible to get into the heaven after he dies. When one tries to recall his past, but only finds that nothing worthy of being remembered, he would be extremely sad. So does the little old man. He has realized the 上一页 [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] 下一页
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