The Love Handles of J. Alfred Prufrock

In The Literary Enneagram, Characters from the Inside Out, Judith Searle says that “T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ offers a succinct and elegant portrait of a Nine. Prufrock’s vagueness, personal insecurity, and lack of decisiveness are common to unevolved Nines.”

We might say that the capital sin or chief fault of Nines is sloth. In Prufrock’s case, sloth manifests as mental irresolution, physical laziness and a need to stuff himself with junk food. In this ...