Tom Colket wrote:
>
>
> CR wrote:
> CR> the only person perplexed by the overwhelming
>
> CR> question is Prufrock, and not another person beside him.
>
> What makes you think Prufrock is perplexed?
>
    From Eric Thompson's brief interpretation of the poem: "Thus we are 
prepared, as in classic theatre, to watch the protagonist proceed from 
wrong to wrong until he or we recognized the blind spot in his motivation."

  "Eliot's middle scene constitutes the longest and most intricate one 
in the poem, but if we concentrate on what is essential, following 
Prufrock as he struggles up the stairs, as he wrestles with the dead 
lumber in his head, and as he draws near to the person he has come to 
visit, there is a moment of suspended Prufrockian thought, a moment when 
Prufrock _is_ his experience, a moment such as we get used to watching 
for in Eliot, where the door out of the corridor suddenly opens, and we 
are invaded by a sense of reality."  The moment is almost sufficient "to 
bring him to his act. His 'Shall I say?' shows him on the verge of 
entering a real present. But then he fall back and rejoins the arthropods."

  Why? Because he does not see what we see when we read that section, 
the light answering light as it is reflected on the brown hair of the 
woman's arm. Prufrock does not know the question because he does not ask 
it, i.e. he doesn't stand forth in the question, so he only knows there 
is one, not what it is, and thereafter falls into retreat.

Ken A