Bob Dylan's "Dignity"

Bob Dylan’s uplifting song “Dignity” may be, in beat and tone at least, happier than many of his other songs. But if we look deeper into the song, that purely is not the case. The song implies that everyone spends their most intimate moments alone, their most life-changing moments alive, searching for Dignity - well, at least that’s what I get from it. We all have to admit though that Bob Dylan’s singing voice on this song is absolutely iconic with a ton of intonation and animation that makes the song sound almost like a strange, oxymoronic story of people constantly looking for dignity as they “(look) into the lost forgotten years”.

There are many characters in the story and many characters who make a difference to the way the narrator searches for his own dignity. For example, there’s Prince Philip who seems to indirectly inspire the narrator to go on a journey far away in order to search for dignity as he himself had been “abused” by it. The narrator ultimately takes an Arthur Rimbaud-style journey atop the seas, looking for dignity after descending the stairs to the dock from the town.

Bob Dylan’s odyssey continues and each major Dylan song, we know, is a strange and fruitful journey packed full of indirect references, poetic devices and double meanings. We will probably never actually know what this song means unless in comes from Bob Dylan’s own mouth. But I think I can equate this song to another few of his songs including “Gates of Eden” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” with this song being resonant (but more electrical and possibly happier and more optimistic of the journey) of those on “Bringing it all Back Home” (1965).

Bob Dylan makes references to many different characters all doing the same thing, in classic Bob Dylan style, he implies that we are all living a life in which we search for our own humanity, our own meaning and our own ‘dignity’. I don’t know whether he is making a stab at the American Police Force or whether he is actually complimenting them, in classic Dylan style we will never really know. But there is a line in the song that states “…asking the cops wherever I go, ‘have you seen dignity?’” And I think that this could be taken both ways in accordance to when Bob Dylan wrote the song and what was happening at the time. As we know from his early albums, the historical, social and political context of Dylan’s songs are very important for getting to the base of what we can believe is the meaning.

I find that the strangest image in the whole song is the room filled with ‘covered up mirrors’. This maybe suggests to me that the narrator doesn’t actually have a face or reflection and that self-reflection can take away the joy of trying to find dignity. Maybe the narrator did something he isn’t proud of and now he’s on the run for his own dignity and yet, he cannot bear to look at himself in the mirror. The other theory I have is that the narrator is actually representative of everyone who has ever felt they have done wrong and needs to search for their dignity and therefore, he doesn’t have an actual face because he looks like everyone.

When the narrator sees a photograph of ‘dignity’, this is the literal opposite of what we believe dignity to be and so, now the listener would obviously think this is something tangible and that the narrator is going to find dignity after all. Something that is actually tangible is far easier to find than something that is not. But the song seems to end with a cliffhanger, and the journey in which the narrator is searching for dignity has not ended. Even though we have listened to this whole song which is a journey to finding dignity, we have been proven wrong to think that we will find him/her at the end of the song. Instead, by the end of the song in which the narrator takes the journey out to sea, we are actually at the very beginning of the search. We are about to set off to find dignity.