Dostoyevsky's narrator vs. J. Alfred Prufrock

The protagonist in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “Notes from Underground” feels like a narrated version of J. Alfred Prufrock from the T.S. Elliot poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; and both characters have some light to shed on each other.
Prufrock is struggling to make himself fit into the intellectual crowd of his day, particularly the room where the beautiful and refined speak of Michelangelo, or rather they speak of art and beauty and the sublime. Prufrock wants to be considered one of these intellectuals, but is too concerned with what people will think of him to actually join the crowd. His nervous preoccupation with bald spots and clothing and thinning arms has sufficiently distracted him from achieving his societal goals. But the tragedy is not that failure, but the fact that he can look back and realize “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;” which is to say he has never lived his life. All his time has been spent catering to this crowd which he both aches to belong to and seemingly despises.
Dostoyevsky’s narrator is slightly different in his perception of himself. He thinks of himself as an intellectual already, and far superior to any other. But he spends his days fretting and ranting and deciding and undeciding . He wants desperately, more than anything, to have human companionship. But his gigantic preoccupation with status and appearance and what he supposes people really think when they see him ruins any social interaction he may have achieved through his supposed intellect.
When looking at the two characters together, there is the obvious comparison of vanity, where even the wording is uncannily similar, such as when Dostoyevsky’s character rants, “I’ve grown thinner! My clothes! Oh, damn my trousers,” while Prufrock stresses that others will say “But how his arms and legs are thin.” As well, they both are trying to impose themselves upon the upper class of society while they both remain in the lower class, at least so far as wealth and status is concerned. Prufrock realizes his imposition as he ascends the stair to the intellectuals, thinking “And indeed there will be time/To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’/Time to turn back and descend the stair.” It is almost an involuntary, or at least uncontrollable, urge to ascend the stair, apparently against his better judgment or even desire. But Dostoyevsky’s character does the same, inviting himself to a dinner with friends who are not really friends, but who do belong to higher society. He even despises these people, while at the same time being completely unable to not go to dinner with them. After inviting himself he fumes, “’What possessed me, what possessed me to force myself upon them? … for a scoundrel, a pig like that Zverkov! Of course I had better not go.’ … But what made me furious was that I knew for certain that I should go, that I should make a point of going; and the more tactless, the more unseemly my going would be, the more certainly I would go.”
Having noted these similarities, it is time for the effect these characters have on each other, or rather on the reader’s interpretation of them.
Prufrock repeats often that there is time. He says there is time to ascend and descend the stair, drink coffee, revise, revise and contemplate indecision. But if we look at Dostoyevsky, we see that there isn’t time, and that too many “decisions and revisions” leads to drowning or, in the narrated version, twenty years of stewing over the stupid, uneducated world underground, having no place among any people, and filling the crave for social activity with venom and spite.
Prufrock allows the reader to see Dostoyevsky’s character for who he really is, not a self-proclaimed intellectual, but as a friend-starved, poor man, with nothing but his intellect to keep him even alive, much less happy and fulfilled. And Dostoyevsky’s character allows us to see the folly of Prufrock’s thinking, that preoccupation with appearance and trying to force your way into a class of society where you don’t belong, or rather where you don’t really want to be, will end your life eventually, making you into an outcast; not a society-mandated outcast, but a self-inflicted outcast. Both of these characters are who they are, and fail where they fail, because of their over-active minds and labels they impose upon themselves.
And as the title to Prufrock’s piece indicates, both he and Dostoyevsky’s narrator are seeking love, they simply don’t have the wits to see it, even when it smacks them in the face.