The Uneasiness of Modern City Life: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
the muttering retreats

The lines “Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,” indicates the narrator has moved from prompting his companion to go with him, to guiding his companion to a certain end. There seems to be echoes of Dante’s Virgil who let him through the nine concentric levels of Inferno and seven terraces of Purgatorio.

Prufrock, if he is indeed the narrator, appears to be leading his companion to an underworld of some sort: a place where there are “the muttering retreats,” or secret dens, perhaps.

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells

In these lines, the people are restless; they are not sleeping here. The expression “one-night” is redundant in reference to “cheap hotels.” Eliot likely could have made the point with reference to cheap hotels alone, but his use of redundancy here is well done. There is no mistaking the sordid connection of “cheap hotels” with a “one-night” stand.

The saw-dust restaurants are another allusion to something cheap. Sawdust restaurants refer to lower end, often raucous establishments where sawdust is spread on the floor to absorb the mess left by people eating oysters. Additionally, and most importantly, oysters are notable as being an aphrodisiac.

The saw-dust restaurants complement the “one-night cheap hotels,” and cultivates further images of a seedy neighborhood in a red-light district where mutterings can be heard in and around the one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants. The fleshly lure of the underworld is juxtaposed against its tawdry environment and generates a general feeling of uneasiness peculiar to modern city life.