Character guide

Unknown Narrator

major

Also known as your, myself

This voice drifts through drawing rooms, puppet theaters, and Harvard yards, at once a participant and a spy — noting the parrot on the bar, the pensive lamia, the dead jumping-jack. Its tension is between ironic distance and unwanted tenderness: it mocks the lovers it also pities, mourns a marionette it claims was merely common. Because it recurs and mutates, it becomes the reader's guide to Eliot's early range, teaching us how to look before Prufrock teaches us how to hesitate.

J. Alfred Prufrock

major

Prufrock moves through evening streets, tea rooms, and drawing rooms where women come and go talking of Michelangelo, rehearsing a social performance he never quite gives. His desire is to presume — on love, on speech, on the universe — but his flaw is a self-awareness so fine it paralyzes him into revisions and indecisions. He matters because his nervous, digressive voice sets the tone for the whole collection: modern anxiety rendered as a love song that never reaches its beloved.

Sweeney

supporting

Also known as Agamemnon Apeneck Sweeney, Agamemnon

Sweeney appears as muscle and appetite in a world of nerves and teacups, a man whose presence reduces myth to meat. His tension is between the primitive and the parodic: he is both a modern brute and a debased Agamemnon, a hero whose only grandeur is his shamelessness. He matters because he gives Eliot's early arc a counterweight to Prufrock — where one man cannot act, Sweeney acts too easily, and the poems need both to measure what modernity has done to desire.

Tiresias

supporting

Though Eliot calls him a mere spectator, Tiresias is the poem's connective tissue: the one-eyed merchant melts into the Phoenician Sailor, all women become one woman, and the two sexes meet in him. His tension is that he sees everything and can change nothing — a prophet condemned to observe the typist and the young man carbuncular with the same weary clarity. He matters because he gives the poem its central consciousness, the eye through which the fragments cohere into a single vision of desire and decay.

Stetson

minor

A fellow soldier addressed in The Waste Land, linked to the Punic Wars and resurrection.

Mr. Apollinax

minor

A witty, disruptive houseguest who unsettles a tea party with his laughter and intellect.

Perseus

minor

Mythological hero referenced in juvenilia, slaying Medusa and rescuing Andromeda.

Saint Mary Woolnoth

minor

Also known as Mary, Saint

A church personified in The Waste Land, marking time with a dead sound on the final stroke.

Phlebas the Phoenician

minor

Also known as Water Phlebas the Phoenician, Consider Phlebas

A drowned Phoenician sailor whose death is contemplated in The Waste Land.

Goonight Lou

minor

Also known as Goonight

A character in Sweeney Agonistes, part of a vaudeville-style dialogue.

Pipit

minor

A young girl addressed in A Cooking Egg, associated with innocence and memory.

Grishkin

minor

A Russian ballerina with a seductive, animalistic presence in Whispers of Immortality.

Mrs. Porter

minor

Mentioned in The Waste Land, associated with a bawdy ballad and spring rain.

Marie

minor

Also known as Goonight May

A woman recalling childhood sledding and reading in The Waste Land's opening.

Michelangelo

minor

The Renaissance artist referenced in The Waste Land, associated with a painting.

Juliet

minor

Shakespeare's tragic heroine, alluded to in The Waste Land and other poems.

Princess Volupine

minor

A decadent socialite in Burbank with a Baedeker, symbolizing cultural decay.

Madame Sosostris

minor

A clairvoyante in The Waste Land who reads tarot cards and warns of death by water.

Dear Mrs. Equitone

minor

A correspondent in The Waste Land, addressed in a letter about spiritualism.

Lil

minor

A woman in The Waste Land whose husband Albert returns from war, discussed in a pub.

Circe

minor

The enchantress from Homer's Odyssey, appearing in a juvenilia poem as a seductive witch.

Gérard de Nerval

minor

Also known as myself

The French poet referenced in The Waste Land, walking his lobster on a leash.

Henry Clarke Warren

minor

A Buddhist scholar referenced in The Waste Land, associated with the Buddha's Fire Sermon.