In "love song of J. alfred prurock" By T.S. Eliot what was his biggest flaw? why?

Question

What was the main charactors biggest flaw and why?

Answer 1

He's emotionally repressed.

The poem is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man--overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Prufrock, the poem's speaker, seems to be addressing a potential lover, with whom he would like to "force the moment to its crisis" by somehow consummating their relationship. But Prufrock knows too much of life to "dare" an approach to the woman: In his mind he hears the comments others make about his inadequacies, and he chides himself for "presuming" emotional interaction could be possible at all. The poem moves from a series of fairly concrete (for Eliot) physical settings--a cityscape (the famous "patient etherised upon a table") and several interiors (women's arms in the lamplight, coffee spoons, fireplaces)--to a series of vague ocean images conveying Prufrock's emotional distance from the world as he comes to recognize his second-rate status ("I am not Prince Hamlet"). "Prufrock" is powerful for its range of intellectual reference and also for the vividness of character achieved.

Answer 2

He's right-it's the fact that he can't seem to express his feelings. Prufrock is a play on words for "Prude in a Frock." Prude is defined by the American Heritage Dictionary as "One who is excessively concerned with being or appearing to be proper, modest, or righteous." It comes from the French word prude femme, which refers to a "virtuous woman." A woman of virtue suppresses her feelings for propriety's sake, just like Alfred J. Prufrock in the Poem. Prufrock is sexually frustrated and it seems he has same romantic interest in a woman, but most of it plays out in his mind, rather than in the physical plane. He never does anything about his feelings, keeps them repressed within himself. The question in the poem is whether he will go out and do something about these feelings he has, and since he doesn't, his main flaw is his inability to overcome his fear, reservations, and prudish mentality by simply expressing himself to others rather than keeping all his passion pent up within himself.