The backdrop could be London but Eliot probably intends it to be any city in the modern world.
Prufrock himself has begun to fall apart as he begins his journey with the words ‘Let us go now, you
and I’ (Line 1) and here we get the feeling that he is talking to a disembodied self as he is ‘etherized
upon a table’ (Line 3). The use of the word ‘etherized’ alerts us to the fact that this is a trip, an
existential space where time is not linear and there is no longer a fixed centre.
As the first stanza opens the images of the new modernity begin to take shape. We witness the
underbelly of the city, the ‘cheap hotels’ (line 6), with the implication of sordid sexual activity, and
shabby ‘sawdust restaurants’ (line 7), reminding us of things spilled or broken. These images with
the repetition of ‘Let us go’ (line 1) three times re-emphasise the drudgery, boredom and alienation
that modern life now has to offer. This is a ‘world-picture of fragmentation, contingency and
provisionality that underlies the main Modernist writings of the 1920s’ (Graham p. 206). So Eliot
has bookmarked the new modernity as he begins “Prufrock”, but ‘captures the social environment of
the poet’s own class’ (Datta P.40) and, by implication only the individual experience.
In “The Waste Land” Eliot moves from the subjectivity of Prufrock to expand upon a general theme
of decay and decline that encompasses the entire culture of Europe past and the present. In this poem
Eliot brings to the fore the full impact of Yeat’s line, where society has degenerated in ‘A heap of
broken images’ (Line 22) and there appears to be no hope of renewal, ‘April’, the month of rebirth
after winter is now ‘the cruellest month’(line 1). If in “Prufrock” individual identity is fragmented
then in “The Waste Land” we witness society in chaos because of moral and spiritual bankruptcy,
characterised by abnormal sexual activity. The homosexual activity hinted at in Mr. Eugenides offer
of ‘a weekend at the Metropole’ (Line 214) is a symbol of the barrenness that stalks the land. Eliot
reminds us that this activity also happened in the past, the reference to Thebes and how its land and
people became infertile due to an incestuous relationship between Oedipus and his mother is