Empoword

Additional Readings 435 Moonlight (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) Read the Pitchfork article on Moonlight's Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.. Inauthenticity, Inadequacy, and Transience: The Failure of Language in “Prufrock ” 131 “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” widely regarded as the work that brought T.S. Eliot into a position of influence and prominence amongst his literary contemporaries, delineates the psychosocial trappings of a first-person speaker struck by the impossibility of identity, interaction, and authenticity in a modern society. Although the poem establishes J. Alfred Prufrock, a typical ‘anti-hero’ of modernist style, as its speaker and central focus, Eliot seeks to generalize to a broader social commentary: the piece reveals the paralyzing state of universal disempowerment in social interaction by exploring a broken system of signification and identity. Eliot’s poem filters its communication through the first-person speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock; however, the audience is implicated directly and indirectly in the consciousness of Prufrock. Ironically, the central conflict of the poem is the subject’s inability to engage and communicate with the world around him. However, in multiple fashions, even in the very process of performance and reading of the poem, we the audience are interpellated into Prufrock’s hellish existence. The epigraph of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” draws from Dante’s Inferno , immediately conjuring the idea of Hell for the audience. The epigraph, in conjunction with the first line of the piece— “Let us go then, you and I” (1)—and the repetition of second-person and collective first- person pronouns, implicates the reader in an implied tour of Prufrock’s personal Hell, a state of imprisonment within his own consciousness. Prufrock is a speaker characterized first and foremost by overwhelming fear and alienation, stemming from his hypersensitivity to time, his disillusionment with the failure of communication, and his inability to construct a stable self. He frequently questions his capacity to relate to those around him, wondering repeatedly, “[H]ow should I presume?” (54, 61). Prufrock, worrisome over the audacity implicit in presumption and fearful of the consequences, hesitates to engage at all, instead setting himself in frustrated isolation and insecurity. Throughout the work, Eliot insists that one of the few certainties of Prufrock’s bleak existence is, paradoxically, uncertainty: from Prufrock’s