The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock Passivity Quotes Page 2

Here he’s just lazing around, like a kid on summer holiday, eating sweet foods and trying not to "wake up" the afternoon/evening, which is being personified as a sleeping person. It’s hard to tell whether the evening is really tired, though, or if it’s just "malingering," or faking it to get out of doing something important. Kind of like Mr. Lazy Bones over there with his "tea and cakes." He’s like the kid who promises to do the dishes after dinner and then after dinner complains, "But I’m too tiiiired!" He doesn’t have the "strength" to do anything that make cause a stir.

In literature, Hamlet is a classic example of a passive character. He spends all his time thinking about whether to murder his uncle, and he never gets around to doing anything about it. But Prufrock is even worse than Hamlet. He’s more like an "attendant lord" who serves a king. Everybody is nice to him, but nobody respects him because he doesn’t want to cause trouble for anyone, including himself. In other words, Prufrock is saying that he’s not even the main character in his own story.