Blog 2 Prompt 3

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T.S. Eliot, ia a poem about a man named J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock is a timid and self demeaning man. He finds himself at a party and is attracted to many of the women there. In the present moment of the event, one of his friends is very confident and can talk to multiple women. However, Prufrock is quite the opposite of his friend, in that he is worried about making a fool of himself when he tries to woo one of the ladies. The poem exemplifies the contrast and duality between the real external events versus the internal dialogue that takes place during these situations. The poem utilizes a lot of descriptive imagery to convey the environment inside Prufrocks mind. His internal battle can be best exemplified by stanza 30 of the poem where Eliot writes "Time for you and Time for me, and time yet for a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of toast and tea." This line expresses the internal conflict in Prufrocks mind. As an outsider looking at the exterior of the situation and trying to analyze and observe his behavior, it's unlikely that one could ever fully comprehend the extent of his thoughts. If one could understand his internal dialogue, then they would be able to understand his rather anti-social  behavior at the social gathering. This is a concept which happens in every day life, yet we don't tend to place much emphasis or think about it much. All of our every day interactions have more than one story behind them. When people are involved their mindsets and experiences are brought into play.

A modern day media example of this can be seen in the television show called Thirteen Reasons Why. The show follows a girl named Hannah Baker, who commits suicide. Before she commits the act, she records 13 tapes, each is about one of the people who drove her to commit suicide. Although  Externally it seems as if she was just strongly impacted by her environment or had some predisposition towards mental illness. Once we listen to each tape and hear the mental and emotional toll which each person ravaged on her mindset, the outcome is much more understandable. We realize that although the events that took place in Hannah's high school life tended to be negative. No one would have been able to understand the emotional toll if Hannah hadn't recorded those tapes. Therefore the mentality behind most situations is just as important if not more important than the actual events that take place.

Both of these stories exemplify how just because the events that occur on the surface level may seem trivial, that the mentality behind them can have much deeper and complex meanings. This is the reason why in Eliot's poem he's unable to ask any woman out, similarly, in 13 Reasons Why, Hannah is unable to voice her internal struggles until it's too late. Therefore, both the Love Song and Thirteen Reasons Why exemplify the duality of how real events shape the way that individuals perceive and react to these events.