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...