t to touch God's finger but can't quite reach. While Prufrock doesn't belong to either of these two classes completely, he does have characteristics of both. He claims to be "Full of high sentence; but a bit obtuse" while "At times, indeed, almost ridiculous"(117-118). Being the outsider that he is, Prufrock will not be accepted by either class; even though he can clearly make the distinction between the two and recognize their members: "I know the voices dying with a dying fall/ Beneath the music from a farther room."(52-53). This Shakespearean suggests that Prufrock is just out of reach of the group of people that he wishes to be associated with in life and love, but most likely his feelings of insignificance prevent him from truly associating with anyone at all.He sees himself as a unique "specimen" of nature, in a class all by himself - "And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin/ When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,"(57-58). This image suggests that not only is he an object for speculation, but he is trapped in that role; a situation which he is obviously unhappy with but has no idea how to change. He asks himself, "Then how should I begin"(59). At this point in the poem, Prufrock is beginning to feel especially detached from society and burdened by his awareness of it. He thinks "I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Eliot not only uses imagery here to create a picture of a headless crab scuttling around at the bottom of the ocean, but he uses the form of the poem itself to help emphasize his point here. The head is detached from the crab, and the lines are detached from the poem in their own stanza, much like Prufrock wishes his self-consciousness would just "detach" itself. This concept is echoed in the very next stanza when he says, "Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in/ upon a platter,"(83), an allusion to the beheading of John the Bap...
