Case Study
"Case Study", first published in 1965 in Ezekiel's fourth volume of poems entitled The Unfinished Man is a confessional poem with psychological overtones. It is psychological study of a man who lacks firmness of purpose and is by nature weak willed. He fails to make up his mind about his career or his mission in life. It is a vivid portrait of a wavering, weak-willed and irresolute person who is in the real sense "the unfinished man." The narrator is a third person who may be the poet himself.
Or bluff his way throughout with brazen check?
The narrator found that whatever the unfinished man has done "was not quite right." He had no knowledge of what to do in life. The teachers had never failed in their assessment of their own deeds, but he could not even follow their example. He could not choose a career for himself.
Ought he to practice yoga, study Greek,
After studying in an ordinary school and at a worthless college, he had had a foolish love affair. Then he patiently tried to build some sort of career for himself but he had not the courage and determination "to climb with quick assault the envied stair." The knowledge he had attained at the "rotten college" could not be useful and helpful to him. At last, he had resolved to try his hand at politics. He then felt that "his marriage was the worst mistake of all." Although he loved his children, he spoiled them with too much love and also with too much of a disciplinary control over them. At last, he felt that he was "damned in that domestic game." He worked at various jobs but he could not be successful in any one of them. Then he stopped for looking other jobs. Those who knew him told that he conceived impossible projects which he afterwards abandoned. He was not a man of action. In fact he never moved "unless he found something he might have loved."
One day he went to the narrator to seek his advice. He advised him to change his purposeless and irresolute behaviour and to use the intelligence he had got. The last stanza is pregnant with a sound moral:
It with a sudden jerk, but use your head.
not all returned as heroes who had fled
In wanting both to have and eat the cake.
not all who fail are counted with the fake.
In "Case Study" Ezekiel uses the technique of "perspective narration". The technique of retrospective narration has psychological overtones and undertones.
