"Let us go, you and I/ When the evening is spread out against the sky/ like a patient etherized upon a table."- These lyrics, representing an emerging dawn, were found to be violent by some of Eliot's early readership. To us, these lines are passive; somnolent; they imply a pensile sleep that sticks with vague and shadowy consistency to Prufrock's ever deferred "revisions" of his life. But we shouldn't dismiss earlier reviews merely because they can no longer be intuitively perceived by ourselves in our own epoch; one of the primary functions of literary criticism is to show us that language and discourse- in a word, "signs"- can mean different things to different ages. We read a different Eliot than was read in the 20's and 30's, but the observation documented then are windows through which we can see aspects of Eliot that very much suit our purposes. Our thesis, then, is this: A primary affinity shared between Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and the novels As I lay Dying and Winesburg, Ohio (by William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, respectively) is the theme of violence.
             In Faulkner's As I lay Dying, this theme is explicit. The characters of the novel are isolated from city life, and do not exist within the terms of propriety that governs such life. They are mistrustful of city manners, and the law itself. "It aint that I'm afraid of work; I always is fed me and mine and kept a roof above us: it's that they would short-hand me just because he tends to his own business, just because he's got his eyes full of the land all the time." This character- "Anse"- goes on to say of his situation, "[They're] trying to short change me with the law." "They," are bankers and travelers and, no doubt, the IRS- all of whom have access to his home because he built it along side a road. To take this situation of Anse's as a metonym for the novel itself, of the import of As I Lay Dying, and juxtapose it with Eliot'...