Great Works II

Living in a society where the drastic evolution of industry and urbanization endangered culture and people’s spiritual life,  Prufrock, a sensitive and emotional man wandering in the yellow frog, is suffering from the existential crisis.  How can someone with such a imaginative and neurotic mind find a place in this world?  The evening is spreading like a etherised patient lying upon a table,women are having tedious talks about Michelangelo. People lost their interiorities, they mask their emotions and put on different faces when meeting different people.

Prufrock walked through the tedious streets, he has already seen enough mornings, afternoons, evenings, eyes and people, and the rest of of life can already be anticipated and measured by coffee spoons ; things seem so meaningless and endless. He wants to make some change, but does he dare disturb the universe? He’s not confident enough to do so,just as how he keeps hesitating to ask the girl that “overwhelming question”. So “how should I persume”?  He keeps asking himself.  Should he persume that the girl has the same feeling for him? But what if he interpreted all the signs wrong and the girl tells him “that is not what I meant at all”.  He dares not ask, he dares not disturb, because he is so frightened about the possible changes that can be brought about by the answer. It may not worth it.

So he wants to escape, just as how the man in the painting Scream departs from the society. He wants to become a crab, “scuttling across the floors of silent seas”.  He may grow old in the same state, with the same pessimism.  And the mermaids will never sing for him.  He will be drown deep in the see, with other human beings. And human soles will only be enlightened again “till human voices wake us” – until human beings find their cultures and subjectivities back in this modern world.

The fragmentation of allusions and situations, and the streams of consciousness constructs Prufrock’s sensitive and emotional interior world, which stands in stark contrast to the empty exterior society.  The repetitive questioning of “do I dare” and “how should I persume” demonstrated his struggling and hesitation.  lacking of courage and confidence, he eventually lives and dies in pessimism.

“Do we dare disturb the universe?  For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.”