Yes, gentle reader, he is. J. Alfred Prufrock is as lame as they come. The man can't gain traction on anything. Visions and revisions. Daring to do stuff. Eating peaches. Mermaids. Hamlet. Baldness. And yes, asking overwhelming questions. Heck, wanting to think about the act of asking a question.
Can't. Do. Anything.
Lame.
But probably not. The whole point of this stream of consciousness interior monologue is to get as meta as possible. I always find it intriguing that we catch up with poor Alfred precisely as he is sticking his toes over the abyss, staring down the "overwhelming question" that we can't ask about. I find it intriguing because we, the audience (the understood "you" referenced in line 1), catch up with him after skipping over the all those visions and revisions. And yet he's still talking about them.
Why?
One question (and there are dozens and dozens of those for this poem...) to consider is:
Is Prufrock's uncertain position unique to his place in time? In other words, is Eliot exploring a strictly Modernist view of life? The idea of a common man being anchored, unwillingly, to indecision because of a some kind of self-prescribed existential self-loathing? If that's the case, then boo-hoo. If that's the case, then have things improved or proceeded to get worse, since this poem is about 100 years old. If not, then what?
If this poem is more universal in nature than just for the self-loathers out there (sorry to intrude!), then what else? This is, after all, a love song, and I don't think Eliot is using that term lightly.
