Anti-Hero

Modern society, with its fast-paced lifestyles and high technologies, has received criticisms from many including Joseph Campbell who described the current situation as a “stagnation of inauthentic lives and living . . . that evokes nothing of our spiritual life, our potentialities, or even our physical courage.” According to Campbell, modern society has made us all into listless people who only think and complain but never take action. People in modern society can’t be heroes, because they don’t take action. Instead, we can only be described as antiheros. The protagonist in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” seems to be just that. The whole poem is something that went on in one man’s mind. The poem presented the reader with J. Alfred’s Prufrock’s “journey” of unresolved issues with self-confidence and ways to present himself. The narrator never takes any action, but just sits at the side and worries about his life. From the beginning of the poem till the very end, nothing changes. The narrator did even make up his mind to change the way he thinks, or try to experience something new. He just hints at his problems and let it hang there, never solving it.