Narratives

The key concepts I tried to capture in my narratives is a feeling of uneasiness, of silence, longing, entrapment and tension. I want there to be a sense of imagination and potential, like a person straining to be free, imagining a life outside the box, but throughout pervading a sense of loneliness and endless monotony.

An influence on my narratives are the poems of T.S. Elliot, whose Preludes from Prufrock and Other Observations I learned about during school and enjoyed. The words "burnt out days" and concepts relating to dust are drawn from the phrase:

I THE WINTER evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps	5
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,	10
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.

One line that particularly resonated with me was the second last phrase which goes:

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle	50
Infinitely suffering thing.

This seemed to me the exact message I want to convey in my model; the idea of fancies and fantasies that only just cling to the person imagining them. The "infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing" seems to me the romantic version of the maid, forever caught in the tedium of serving another, gentle in manner and suffering under the monotony of every day life.

The narratives I would base my model and building concept on would likely revolve around the last two narratives I submitted:

The thirsty servant constructs fantasies in her room of burnt out days

and

A waiting servant unfolds the surface of an uneasy silence