Bob Dylan: A Quest for Self-Identity as a Prophetic Bard

Abstract

An American singer-songwriter, Bob Dylan, was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” Namely, he had developed his own characteristics into a unique style labeled ‘Dylanesque.’ Notably, Dylan’s life and career had been full of seeming inconsistences. During his early years in the ’60s, many of his songs were full of the high spirit of social protest and human rights. He, however, had transformed his character from a revolutionary of his generation to a Christian-devoted bard in the late ’70s. Dylan moved away from being a critique of injustice on a social and institutional level to self-confrontation on an introspective level. Although, he consistently advocated justice and freedom throughout his career. To summarize, Dylan can been seen as a poet-prophet through the accumulation of his body of work. Furthermore, throughout his artistic life, Dylan has viewed the world from eschatological and apocalyptic perspectives, and infused biblical text into his poems. This study is about Dylan’s quest for self-identity as a prophetic bard in the tradition of Anglo-American romanticism.