Bob Dylan's new album, John Wesley Harding, is like the feeling left long after seeing "Bonnie and Clyde": gently anarchic. It is the anarchy of everyone doing his own thing, assuming that freedom can exist only outside the laws and layers of society. The outsiders—outlaw, hobo, immigrant, joker, thief, girl in chains, drifter, saint—form an existential community simply in reaction to them". But Dylan is hardly simplistic: the album is a collection of narratives in precise moods and voices, and its affirmation lies in the community between artist and audience, in the poet's certainty that his vision is shared by those capable of understanding it. (p. 406)

The lyrics combine various formal conventions—ballad structures, allegorical characterizations, the epic distance of moral tales—with enigmatic Dylanisms. He is the master of the put-on as he sings narratives with no dramatic action, eluding meaning-seekers while drawing attention to the tone, imagery and assumptions of the voice he adopts. For example, "John Wesley Harding" is about an American Robin Hood, friend to the poor, who "never hurt an honest man." Dylan sings of the "time they talk about"—but skips the expected climax and we learn only that "he took a stand" and soon the situation was "all but straightened out." The only quality making Harding the hero of the song (and, as it is the title song, of the album) is his lawless goodness: he carries a gun in "every" hand but his virtues are gentle, even Christian…. Dylan's playful use of syntax here ("a gun in every hand") and of rhyme and pronunciation elsewhere (in "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest" fright is pronounces "freight" to rhyme with sight pronounced "sate,") contrasts with clichés like "always lend a helping hand," trite rhymes like "moon … spoon" and tortured word orders for the sake of rhyme. Is Dylan mocking the rules and limitations of language, using them to move beyond convention—or is he simply hung up trying to find rhymes and meters for his thoughts so they will somehow become songs? There is no reason why he would have to use rhymes if felt they were only hanging him up. The rest of his verbal games are so sophisticated that this ineptitude seems to be part of a colossal and maybe defensive put-on. The attractive thing about put-ons is that you can wait for others' reactions before deciding how straight you want to play.

Dylan plays high on a tightrope strung out between richly religious, allusive moralizing and an arch tone of complete put-on. The Christian metaphors in "I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine" are used straight, without undercutting…. [The] final image of the speaker ("I put my fingers against the glass / And bowed my head and cried") leaves a very real but mysterious sense of fear, guilt and aloneness: the old symbols work in vague emotional evocation, but any precise "interpretation" must follow the jaunty mockery of the harmonica's coda to a different end.

The sense of vague secular apocalypse is strongest in "All Along the Watchtower," a song that gets better all the time…. [It] condences and reflects much of the rest of the album…. Roughly paraphrased [the lyrics say]: society is a total assault on jokers and thieves (Shakespeare's fools, biblical outcasts, the outsiders-as-social critic;) but rather than bitter invective, the reaction here is a casual certainty of revolution. "We" out here just have to get ourselves together and it will happen; "they" (princes, their women and barefoot servants) in there are doomed. The magnificent vagueness of "the wind began to howl," which could be the beginning of the song, is totally unlike the lack of climax in "John Wesley Harding." The title song is in the past tense, and we are assured by the narrative voice that everything came out all right, and that the specific action is irrelevant where the style of the hero becomes morality and affirmation. But here the issue is a kind of religious belief—hippie faith in the drug revolution, political faith in the third world and guerrilla warfare—a hope for radical change in the future-present that becomes apocalyptic as one becomes increasingly committed to it. Still, the belief that "it" will happen is tempered here by the frozen imminence of apocalypse, and it remains as accessible to doubts and hopes as the present. (p. 407)