An Analysis of the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The general fragmentation of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is obvious. The poem seems a perfect example of what Terry Eagleton calls the modern "transition from metaphor to metonymy: no longer able to totalize his experience in a heroic figure, the bourgeois is forced to let it flow into objects linked to him by pure contiguity." Everything in "Prufrock" is dispersed into parts linked together only by contiguity. Spatial progress in the poem is distrusted or deferred, a “sinking” accomplished by a pair of disembodied claws so violently that they remain “ragged.” In the famous opening, "the evening is stretched out against the sky / Like a patient etherized on a table", and the simile creates an equation between being stretched out and being etherized which continues elsewhere in the poem when the evening, now a ugly patient, "simulators, / Lying on the floor, here beside you and me." There he “sleeps so peacefully! / Smoothed by long fingers...". This suspension is a rhetorical condition as well as a spatial and emotional one. The "roads that follow one another like a dull argument / Of treacherous intent" lead not to a conclusion but to a question, a question too "overwhelming" to even ask. Phrases like "muttering retreats / Of restless nights" combine physical blockage, emotional turmoil, and rhetorical ramblings in an equation that seems to make the human being a combination not of angel and beast but of Roberts's roadmap and rules of order . In some verses the metaphor dissolves into metonymy before the reader's eyes. "The yellow fog that rubs its back on the window panes" clearly appears to every reader as a cat, but the cat itself is absent, represented... in the center of the paper... it becomes a collection of individual parts, just like the the poem's human inhabitants had been little more than parts: "And I have already known the eyes, I have known them all"; "And I have known weapons, I have already known them all." The instantaneous movement from the part to the whole, from the eyes, to the arms, to the evenings, to the mornings, to the "whole", expresses the void between, the gap between the dispersed parts and an oppressive whole made of purely serial repetition. The very reduction of the human being to parts of himself and of time to episodes makes it impossible to conceive of a whole other than this empty and repetitive «an». As Burke says, metonymy replaces quantity with quality, so that instead of living life Prufrock feels, "I've measured my life in coffee spoons." Works Cited Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.