Lyric discussion by Backstage 

Cover art for All Along the Watchtower lyrics by Bob Dylan

It's cool that a 35 year old song can still get people to think and more, to discuss meaning. That's the power of poetry. I've been listening to this song since 1968 and have a few thoughts. Back then Dylan was not writing or talking about Jesus at all, certainly not in any way that foreshadowed his conversion experience ten years later. But he had written poetry for a long time about the meaning of life and our dilemmas as thinking beings. What is there to believe in? What has real meaning? is there anyone we can trust? What is the risk of stepping outside the norms and commonplace meanings of things and looking at ourselves directly? This song, I think, borrows a mythical style and setting to set up the problem of meaninglessness in our existence. The two personalities are both outsiders, a joker who lacks conventional dignity and a thief who lacks conventional morality. They are outside of the walls of psychological safety, where the regular social order still holds, despite the threats from wolves and howling winds. I read these as metaphors for the psychological dangers one must face when throwing off easy explanations of life's meaning. One must be very brave to be outside those walls. But there is no going back once you have cast off conventions -"You and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate, let us not talk falsely now the hour is getting late." This is a crisis, he's saying, a crisis of existence itself.

So, it's the opposite of an endorsement of Christianity or any other religion. It's a description of the land where a seeker of truth must find his own way, whatever the dangers may be.

This song, in its three little stanzas, is wonderful writing and courageous personal philosophy. This is why Dylan was and still is considered one of our culture's great voices.

What an insightful comment!

It's funny, I've been searching all over for someone who interpreted the song the way I did. Not to toot our collective horns, but I think this is right. This is an existential song. It's a song about two thinking beings confronting the existential questions of existence.

"There must be some way out of here, "there's too much confusion --The joker is having an existential crisis. He's saying "Holy shit, I'm really alive in the world, I'm a suffering human being, how do I get out of here?" There's also something suicidal about this, I think--in asking "There...

My Interpretation

It could be (but that is just a supposition) that the joker and the thief are the two people who were condemed at the same that Jesus. Being oppressed Jews from romans occupants for too long they did rebel and commited violents crimes. This ought to be then a methaphore discuusion of the 2 of them before the romans come to bring the execution up. There are other possibilities of course since the imaginary language allow the listene/reader to open his/her imagination....Perhaps we should ask Bobby himself what he meant, if he really had something precise in mind...(: )