the love song of George Willard

"It is impossible to say just what I mean!"
- T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

"One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant... one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes." 
- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio


T.S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock and Sherwood Anderson's George Willard both share a fear of the future. For J. Alfred, his fear is more focused on the limited time and life he has left; for George, his fear is of maturity and "sophistication." 

Throughout Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", the narrator is struggling to express his emotions; he wonders how he would go about communicating his feelings, eventually using up all his time uncommunicative. He acknowledges the amount of life that can occur in such little time: "In a minute there is time/For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse" (Eliot 47-48). J. Alfred also realizes that time has past him by, that he's grown old with "a bald spot in the middle of [his] hair" (Eliot 40), representing his age and perhaps the knowledge he accumulated over his lifetime. Despite this recognition, he continues grappling with his inability to voice his emotions, fearful of the misunderstanding that he may receive in return. 

This concept of understanding is also represented throughout Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. George Willard portrays the coming-of-age character of the work, to whom multiple characters attempt to teach the truths of life. Wing Biddlebaum tells George that he's destroying himself, that he "must begin to dream" (Anderson 30). In contrast, George's father tells his son to wake up, while Wash Williams informs George that he must stop dreaming and that he wishes to destroy the dreams in the reporter's head. Kate Swift tells him that "it's time to be living" (Anderson 163). This dream state could be equivalent to his lack of maturity during his childhood, in which he has yet to come in conflict with real world problems. His awakening could represent his maturation into adulthood, when he stops concerning himself with affairs with multiple women and begins focusing on his future. 

J. Alfred and George both reach the point where they question every little thing they do. It begins for J. Alfred when he begins to wonder the worth of the minuscule happenings, of "the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets" (Eliot 101). He also questions future actions, as simple as eating a peach or parting his hair. His inquisitive state reveals his understanding that every small part of his life makes a difference in the long run. As George makes his departure from Winesburg, "the serious and largest aspects of his life did not come into his mind" (Anderson 247); instead, he also thinks of the little things. He reaches a point when he "takes the backward view of life" (Anderson 234) in which he evaluates how meaningless his life has been. He equates his life up to that point as a leaf blowing in the wind, resembling how weak and dispassionate he's been throughout his adolescent years. This marks his acknowledgment that he wishes to make a change in the future and become more of a "man."