The conscious and subconscious are two important themes in discussing both the 1919 poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot, and the Derek Walcott's 1967 play "Dream on Monkey Mountain." In discussing the authors use of the conscious and subconscious in these two works many similarities and differences can be found.
In T.S. Eliot's poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Eliot startles the reader by using dramatic shifts in and out of the main character Prufrock's thoughts (subconscious) and what is consciously going on. The Poem is about a timid and downcast man in search of meaning, of love, in search of something to break him from the dullness and superficiality that he feels his life to be. Eliot lets us into Prufrock's world exploring his progression of emotion from timidity to self-disparagement and, ultimately, to despair of life. In this "Love Song," Prufrock searches for meaning and acceptance by the love of a woman, but fails miserably because of his lack of self-assurance and because of his mouse-like meekness. Prufrock is a man for who, it seems, everything goes wrong, and for whom there are no happy allowances. In a very real way, Prufrock's story is twentieth century mankind's story, too. Eliot's "Prufrock" is brilliant commentary on the fallenness, the emptiness, and the final despair of modern individuals.
The emptiness and the shallowness of Prufrock's "universe" and of
Prufrock himself are evident from the very beginning of the poem. The
lines "When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient
etherized upon a table" (2-3) suggest a certain lifelessness. Likewise,
the women who "come and go Talking of Michelangelo" (13-14) seem to
have nothing better to talk about, for when the women are revisited a
few lines down, they are still talking about the same dead artist
(35-36). The "yellow fog" (15), which by its color has connotations of
sourness, "cu...