Philosophical Connotations As Reflected in Prufrock's Split Self

Mun-Jae LeeFor the postmodern theorists, Derrida and Foucault, the 'death of subject' means the disappearance of subject that can exist independently from his present cultural or social situations, that is, the absence of the rational or autonomous subject. The precursor of postmodernism, Nietzsche's proposition that God is dead points out that our past metaphysical tradition has broken down, resulting in the present axiological anarchy.On the other hand, for the modernist writers, such as Eliot and Joyce, the present world lacks the frames of reference for their literary characters to live by, even though the characters, not to mention their own writers, never stop to search for them, including the eastern and western religions. At least for the time, their characters, for example, Prufrock, Gerontion, Stephen, and Bloom, never possess the positive identities, which in turn prove to be the split selves. In particular, Prufrock as a character typical of Eliot's early poetry shows his uncertain and sometimes split self, which seems to be partially due to his own strong self-consciousness. Noticeably, the self-consciousness cannot be thought without the modern intellectual development, to which the seventeenth-century scientific revolution and Cartesian dualistic rationalism have contributed. Prufrock's characteristic split consciousnesses or selves reflect his contemporary world's epistemological changes rather than his own microcosmic world. In a sense, the "dissociation of sensibility", one of Eliot's major critical terms, indicates the literary situation which our epistemological changes since the seventeenth-century, including philosophical or scientific development, have brought along.