In T.S. Elliot’s Poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, the speaker illustrates the struggle for self expression and how the separated failure to express oneself leads to a disconnection between the individual and the community. One of the many factors that made an individual a grotesque in Winesburg, Ohio was that the characters, other than George Williard, could not self express the truths that were filled in their lives and when they tried it only ended in falsehood. Anderson even says  “The Book of Grotesques”, “It was the truths that made people grotesques. The old man had quite an elaborate theory concerning the manner. It was his notion that the moment one of the people took one of the truths to himself, called it his truth, he became a grotesque and the truth he embraced became a falsehood”. For example, in “The Strength of God”, Reverend cursed himself for seeing Kate Swift smoke a cigarette and nude on her bed, but once he came to terms that maybe he is not a totally awful person, he instead went the radical way and said that Kate Swift must then be the instrument of God if what he did was not bad. In other words, he took the truth that he is not an awful person, and then connected it to a radical belief that because he is not bad than Kate Swift must be a sign from God that is trying to reach him.  He then tries to express it with George Williard, saying on page 92, “I smashed the glass of the window. Now it will have to be wholly replaced. The strength of God was in me and I broke it with my fist.” George then forever on believes that the Reverend had gone mad, and now any connection George will have with him will end with him thinking he is nuts rather than understanding Reverends expression. It is also easy to say that Reverend will never have the same connection with anybody the same way ever again, because he sees something extraordinary (“God”) and the people around him do not see it.

In T.S. Elliot’s poem, the speaker has issues speaking and connecting, like the Reverend, as well. He even makes an illustrated scene between lines 90-98 that explains the utter frustration he has with communicating his thoughts like a normal person, “Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,/Would it have been worthwhile,/To have bitten off the matter with a smile/To have squeezed the universe into a ball/to roll it toward some overwhelming question”. The speaker also makes an allusion to Michelangelo, and his perfect David. Though these woman gush about him and speak about how perfect he is, the speaker has a different sight than the rest of them, just as Reverend believes he sees God in a different viewpoint as well. The speaker even expresses how lamely the women admire Michelangelo on lines 35-36, “In the room the woman come and go/Talking of Michelangelo.” His inability to see perfection the same way woman do hurts his connection with people, therefore creating a boundary between truth and relationships.