Though James Joyce's realist short story "The Dead" and T.S. Eliot's mock-epic poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" both describe a climate of self-conscious emotional inarticulacy and division, the protagonists of each work deny themselves the pleasures of the present by their refusal to integrate differing tenses into their lives. The alienated Gabriel obscures the past and its shades in "The Dead," and the insecure Prufrock's anticipatory nightmares mire him in a …showed first 75 words of 3300 total…

…showed last 75 words of 3300 total…computer revolution, and an ambiguous global power structure will produce much the same work at the start of the 21st-century. Human voices, from all the living and all the dead, will be required for us to mine the past, examine the present, and advance into the future so that we may not drown. Works Cited: Abrams et al. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, sixth edition, vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993.