Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
These lines imply they are in a part of the city where the monotonous streets subtly lead one deeper into the abyss of debauchery. The import of imagery seems characteristic of the Vieux Carre, in New Orleans, or of Greenwich Village, in New York City. They evoke images of catawampus, narrow streets in old sections of a city leading wanderers to curious shops and hidden bars, some of ill-repute.
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Is the narrator anticipating the companion’s need to ask an overwhelming question? Or, does the experience lead the narrator to ask? It is no small question, whatever it is. It is an overwhelming question: enormous, immense, inordinate. It seems almost sacrilegious to attempt to answer a question that might have been meant to be left unanswered. But in light of the narrator’s response to the anticipated question:
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
One might rightly assume the companion is asking what kind of establishment the tedious streets of insidious intent have led them to. But is that by itself an overwhelming question? One could plausibly know the kind of establishment simply by observation. The question is probably a proposal of sex or marriage.
So far the reader appears to have followed the narrator, in a downward trajectory, whether morally, literally, or metaphorically, it is uncertain. It is possible it has all taken place in the narrator’s head. This is the nature of Streams of Consciousness. Thoughts, actions, and feelings are all intermingled. At the very least, the poem gives the feeling Prufrock is, in some manner, sinking. This is particularly true if we accumulate the many references and allusions to the underworld used in the poem: of being a crab scuttling across the floor (73-74), of Lazarus rising from the dead (94-95), and of lingering in the chambers of the sea…“till human voices wake us, and we drown” (129-131). It is probably not a stretch to suggest Prufrock sees himself as a bottom feeder in the underworld, metaphorically, as a low life form. This is the setting for everything else the narrator tells us.
It is interesting to note, when Eliot was 26, three or four years after writing the poem, he wrote in a letter to his friend, Aiken, on 31 December 1914:
I have been going through one of those nervous sexual attacks which I suffer from when alone in a city. Why I had almost none last fall I don’t know—this is the worst since Paris…I am very dependent upon women (I mean female society); and feel the deprivation at Oxford—one reason why I should not care to remain longer—but there, with the exercise and routine, the deprivation takes the form of numbness only; while in the city it is more lively and acute. One walks about the street with one’s desires, and one’s refinement rises up like a wall whenever opportunity approaches. I should be better off, I sometimes think, if I had disposed of my virginity and shyness several years ago: and indeed I still think sometimes that it would be well to do so before marriage.
While there ever remains a wall of separation between the author and his work, the notable similarity between Eliot’s personal feelings of sexual frustration as described in his letter, and Prufrock’s allure to the city combined with his feelings of awkwardness and impotence, shouldn’t be overlooked or dismissed easily. Interestingly, these feelings of desire, impotence (verbally and sexually), and self-loathing are the tension every man experiences in life to one degree or another.
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