Modernist Protagonists

We saw the Modernist perspective in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" and we saw some distinctive earmarks of the Modernist protagonist. J. Alfred Prufrock has similarities to many other protagonists with a modernist point of view, such as Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf's Mrs.Dalloway . Another hero with strikingly similar ideas is Frederic Henry in Ernest Hemmingway's A Farewell to Arms. While not as radically modernist as Eliot's or Woolf's works, Hemmingway uses many modernist ideas and he himself lived during the time of Modernism.
A notable characteristic that these characters share is a preoccupation with death or related issues. Prufrock is concerned about his aging and whether his life will be worthwhile. Similarly Frederic Henry lives with a confirmed acknowledgment of death. He drinks, smokes, and enjoys women, but he always seems detached and hesitant to show his emotion possibly due to the fear that the people he loves will die. Septimus on the other hand does not fear death, however his life has been severely altered by encounters with death on the battlefields of World War I, as has Henry's. Septimus feels that he no longer fits in to society and is often absorbed in his own thoughts, and instead sees death as an escape from a world that he could not hope to understand, and ends up committing suicide.
Septimus and Prufrock both allow their minds to wander which can be illustrated clearly because Woolf and Eliot both use a form of stream-of-consciousness narration, in which we seem to be in the character's mind. This is one of the new innovations in Modernism, and in both Mrs. Dalloway and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" we gain an enormous amount of insight into our characters mentality in a short amount of actual time (One day in Mrs. Dalloway, a few minutes most likely in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")

I'm sorry this isn't as tight as a traditional analysis essay, it meanders a little too much.