The Unknown Citizen by W.H. Auden Essay

Essentially a monologue set within a frame, this poem creates two personae. The anonymous author gives a brief introduction and conclusion. The Wanderer, an aging warrior, who roams the world seeking shelter and aid. The Wanderer’s monologue divides into two distinct parts, the first being a lament for his exile and the loss of kin, friends, home, and the generosity of his king. In nature, he finds absolutely no comfort, for he has set sail on the winter stricken sea. Poignantly, the speaker dreams that he is among his companions, and embracing his king, only to awaken facing the gray, winter sea, and snowfall mingled with hail.

While reading The Stranger I noticed that traits that Albert Camus character depicts in the book are closely related to the theories of Sigmund Freud on moral human behavior. Albert Camus portrays his character of Meursault as a numb, emotionless person that seems to mindlessly play out his role in society, acting in a manner that he sees as the way he’s supposed to act, always living in the moment with his instincts driving him, and if the right circumstance presents itself the primal deep seeded animal will come out. I believe that most of the character’s traits fall under Freud’s notion of the Id and Ego mental apparatus, and don’t believe that his idea of the super-ego is represented in this book.

The Stranger The Stranger exhibits a society that has confined itself with a specific set of social standards that dictate the manner in which people are supposed to act. This ideology determines the level of morality, and how much emphasis should placed on following this certain "ethical" structure. Albert Camus's main character, Meursault, is depicted as a nonconformist that is unwilling to play society's game. Through Meursault's failure to comply with society's values and conform to the norm, he is rejected and also condemned to death by society.

Auden’s poem is a criticism of human perceptions and how we use them to detect, or suppress human suffering. In the first half of the poem Auden “compares versions of indifference by portraying youth and age, animals, and humans” (Shmoop, 2014). In the first few lines of the poem, Auden comments on the perceptions of the “Old Masters” and how they were never wrong in their discernment of suffering. He then compares the old masters perceptions to the perceptions of children and animals and how they are unaware of,

Dwight Okita's poem presents American identity through the innocence of children. They understand what they're taught and what they feel and this shows that Americans

Prompt: Write a unified essay in which you relate the imagery of the last stanza to the speaker’s view of himself earlier in the poem and to his view of how others see poets.

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine is a lengthy poetic attempt at exposing the competing consciousness pertaining to race and racism in society, pitting the historical person against the individual. Set side by side with The Souls of Black Folks and This Land is Your Land by Woodie Guthrie, Citizen takes on a very distinct impression of separate identities competing in one person.

The poem is about an African student receiving an assignment to write a paper from the self, making sure that the paper is true. The student questions the assignment, he wonders if something could really be considered true if written under the pretense of being from ones self. He debates what is considered true for Americans, black or white. While the poem gives little description of the speakers life, we find he is a 22

The author describes this citizen as being an overall regular man in society, who did not change or impact the world by any means. He was a normal man who bought a paper every day

Main Idea: The poet, born in Jamaica and moved to America, has to go through the day to day struggles in order to tolerate the hate he receives only because of his race. The people do not see him for who he really is, however, he can see them for who they really are. Ultimately, he sees himself as better than his haters because he never gives into his rage like the people do.

Albert Camus creates a series of characters in The Stranger whose personality traits and motivations mirror those that are overlooked upon by the average man. Camus develops various characters and scenarios that show true humanity which tends to have been ignored due to the fact of how typical it has become. Camus incorporates abominable personality traits of the characters, variety, consistency, and everyone’s fate.

The French philosopher Roland Barthes once said, “Literature is the question minus the answer” (Barthes 2). This statement hold true for most works of literature that explore a central question. According to Barthes, literature often raises a question, but leaves it up to the reader to determine the answer. The Stranger by Albert Camus is an excellent example of how a central question, “Is there value and meaning to human life?” is raised and left unanswered, resulting in different interpretations of the answer, depending on the viewpoint of the reader. Although the question is never explicitly answered, Camus offers perspectives on what French society regarded the answers to be, such as connections with others, elusion to freedom, and faith in religion and God.

The poem talks about a man- an anonymous “he”- a perfectionist whose poetry was understandable and who, himself, understood “human folly” and the human psyche like “the back of his hand”. He was

     “The Unknown Citizen” by W.H. Auden, is a commentary on government and the materialism of modern man. The poem is written in the form of an obituary inscribed on a monument built by the government in commemoration of an average, upstanding, and decent community member. Throughout the passage, the speaker lists facts about the citizen’s life which he believes prove that the deceased was a valuable person. In actuality these facts represent nothing more than the socially accepted values and actions instilled in society by materialistic views. This makes the government appear unconcerned with the true thoughts and feelings of its people, seeing them only as statistics. We can see this in the subtitle “To

Auden presents an allegory in The Unknown Citizen that begins even before the poem itself. The phrase “Unknown Citizen” appears only once—in the title. This term is an immediate allusion to and parody of the “Unknown Soldier,” especially considering the details of who the poem is dedicated to and the fact that it is found on a marble monument, much like those one might expect to see in Washington, D.C. where the United States is home to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. The “Unknown Solider” is a soldier who cannot be recognized after being found in battle. This sometimes-controversial idea can be interpreted to mean that many people die as unknowns because they lived uninfluential lives. Aside from this large allegory, the poem uses only a few rhetorical devices. In line four, for example, “…in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint” is quite an exaggeration because being “one against whom there was no official complaint” is hardly saintly (2). Another