Prufrock's Overwhelming Question

In T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” I believe Prufrock’s overwhelming question is a marriage proposal because of the severity of his indecisiveness and inner debate of whether or not to ask it. I also believe he does not ask this question because he is in self-denial of his indecisiveness, old, afraid of rejection, and wants to be sure of her answer before he asks the question. Prufrock does not reference marriage in this poem while determining whether or not to court the woman and ask the overwhelming question, so it is unclear if he means to ask the woman he is in love with to marry him or to go out with him. However, due to the severity of his indecisiveness and his constant excuses as discussed, I believe Prufrock treats the overwhelming question with high importance because of its risk. This high risk and importance are logical because if the question is a proposal, then the answer is serious and has the potential to be life-changing. Regardless of what answer she could give, the question alters his and her life emotionally and mentally, and this is why

This self-denial gives him further resolve at the end of the poem to still refuse to propose. Eliot’s allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet is clever in this way because in the play Hamlet is also indecisive; so much so that he needs a reminder from his father’s ghost to kill his uncle, Claudius, who killed his father, took the throne, and married his mother (Shmoop). In this same portion of the poem as the Hamlet allusion, Prufrock admits that he thinks he’s too old to marry, that he is so old fashioned he still “wear[s] the bottoms of [his] trousers rolled” (Greenblatt 1304, line 121). This shows the reader that Prufrock still is adamant that he is not going to propose to the