Complications in the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock The complications of "Prufrock" imply from the beginning of the poem a more direct transformation of the dramatic monologue compared to "Gerontion" when the pronouns used by "I" suggest the presence of an unspecified listener. In many dramatic monologues the listener is also not specified and the reader is invited to assume the role of listener in a one-sided conversation. In "Prufrock", however, it is not clear whether a real conversation is dramatically presented, whether the "I" has an internal conversation with itself or whether the reader is addressed directly. The "you" that is the counterpart of the "I" is found in two places at once, both inside and outside Prufrock's mind and in internal and external scenes that can hardly be imagined based on the minute details provided. The reader's situation is reminiscent of the spectator's position in Velásquez's "Las Meninas", in which a mirror invites identification with the observers of the scene represented in the painting while the geometry of the painting indicates that the illusion of such identification can only be sustained ignoring obvious details. Reader and viewer find themselves both inside and outside the frame of an illusion that cannot be sustained. Two Dante-esque epigraphs precede and follow the title of the poem, one for the entire volume which takes its name from "Prufrock", the other for the poem itself, which is found first in the volume. Together they suggest the oscillation and indeterminacy of Prufrock's position and that of the reader. In the first epigraph Statius mistakes Virgil's shadow for a "solid thing" and momentarily forgets what he himself is and can do. In the second, Guido da Montefeltro bases his speech to Dante on the opposite error, that is, that Dante is not human and cannot carry his words further. Like Statius and Guido, the reader who tries to define the identities and indeterminate positions of "you and I" in the poem will always be wrong. What is taken for a shadow or a fiction can be flesh and blood, and what is taken for living flesh can only be a fiction in a perpetual instability that marks "Prufrock", like "Rhapsody", as the transformative end of a sequence of poems to which it can be said to belong but of which it subverts some implications. Subversion occurs largely through the removal of those seemingly stable referential elements of scene and character that help make possible the illusion of hearing a personal voice in the poem..