Zavestoki, Shulman, And Schlosberg's The Unknown Citizen

Similar to Marx, Ginsberg is against the idea of a small fraction of the people having significant control and power. Even though the poem is harsh on America, the goal of the author is not to shun or shame the country but try to better it. He is an extremely critical patriot trying to correct America’s flaws.

A few people may wonder why the homeless man seems to be the only sign of human life in the poem. The last stanza can be interpreted by the audience in many different ways. “Sunglasses! the man softly exclaims.”

The increasing power and functionality of technology has increasingly invaded privacy and complicated security. Technology has made it possible for the government to

Mass surveillance is a word that has been thrown around every so often in the last few decades, especially ever since George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although this book was released over 60 years ago, some aspects of the book are seeming to become true in the United States, and other parts of the world today. The idea of mass surveillance isn’t so taboo anymore, as there are several programs ran by sovereign countries around the world which monitor their domestic citizens, as well as citizens and leaders of other foreign countries. With all of our technological communication advances since 1949, this age of information is only going to get more severe, and more tracking and monitoring will be done. The biggest offender of doing

The strict surveillance of citizens as seen in Orwell’s novel, 1984, is similar to the government involvement in today’s smart devices due to their advanced technical abilities.

Government surveillance in the past was not a big threat due to the limitations on technology; however, in the current day, it has become an immense power for the government. Taylor, author of a book on Electronic Surveillance supports, "A generation ago, when records were tucked away on paper in manila folders, there was some assurance that such information wouldn 't be spread everywhere. Now, however, our life stories are available at the push of a button" (Taylor 111). With more and more Americans logging into social media cites and using text-messaging devices, the more providers of metadata the government has. In her journal “The Virtuous Spy: Privacy as an Ethical Limit”, Anita L. Allen, an expert on privacy law, writes, “Contemporary technologies of data collection make secret, privacy invading surveillance easy and nearly irresistible. For every technology of confidential personal communication…there are one or more counter-technologies of eavesdropping” (Allen 1). Being in the middle of the Digital Age, we have to be much more careful of the kinds of information we put in our digital devices.

Several conflicts are dramatized in The Unknown Citizen, the most prominent being: conformity of the middle class, government manipulation, and the loss of individualism to the standards of an average citizen. The speaker of this poem is non-traditional as the poem is, in fact, an inscription on a “marble monument erected by the State.” The inscription is dedicated to a “JS/07 M 378”—presumably, “The Unknown Citizen,” although this term only appears in the title. The Unknown Citizen is essentially an elegy, a lament for the dead, written by either a government official or a strong believer in the government. This becomes clear

The poem’s diction reflects the context and a confident, assertive tone. The speaker expresses a high level of self-respect and assurance. It includes

These days the internet has become an essential part to living for almost everyone but one of the controversial topics that people bring up is that whether or not the government should regulate information on the internet. Both sides have valid points which form a reasonable argument. Some people would say that they need to because of the dangers lurking around in the cyber world but the reasons for why the government shouldn’t regulate the Internet outnumber the reasons for why they should. The federal government should not regulate or censor information on the internet because doing so violates the first amendment and citizen’s right to privacy, degrades the educational value of the web, prevents the promotion and facilitation of

Notice that in the last couple lines in the poem “The Unknown Citizen” possesses an condescending tone, which questions the citizen’s state of emotions as well as demonstrate the themes of conformity and loss of individuality. After discussing the citizen’s statistical information, the speaker rhetorically asks “‘Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:” (28). Although the speaker has disclosed a plethora of information of the citizen, it seems as if no one is able to answer those two questions. Since the questions are considered “absurd” (28), it not only validates that the government does not care about its citizens but also that the government does not allow citizens to have freedom or happiness. Since the speaker indirectly reveals

‘Capitalism, Marxism tells us, thrives on exploiting its labourers’- Auden presents a dominant undermining theme in The Unknown Citizen where the protagonist is portrayed to be acting in a conformist manner and thus accepting their lives under Government control and restriction. Through the use of force and threat, the protagonist’s life are being overpowered by rules on how to live their lives in what is deemed to be in a ‘normal way’. Auden, throughout his illustrious collections of poems, philosophically, warns his audience of the dangers of State and its governing’s, often lending itself to a fictional Marxist society which Auden warns the readers against abiding by these rules. Doing so Auden insinuates that you are mocking yourself if you do not expose your individuality. Undermining Communism and its theories Auden, specifically in the Unknown Citizen, slanders a state which fundamentally is an autocratic dictatorship therefore, Marxist readings can be applied. As a result we see the states repression, exploitation and denigration of its supposed valued followers. Therefore, the Unknown Citizen is lavished with undertones of irony and a sense of mocking against people who abide by the law of the State. It is Auden’s way of saying simply; do not live your life like this. The state essentially exploits its labourers which in my understanding is not too dissimilar from how Marxists themselves view Capitalist societies. Tremendously Ironic that this is how Auden

The advancement of technology allows the government to access more information about their citizens. “The Unknown Citizen” tells a story of a citizen’s life to death through the eyes of the government. The government seeks to publicize their superiority so they may receive more fame and glory, but while doing so, they magnify their faults. In the poem, W. H. Auden uses formal word choice to create a serious tone with a sarcastic effect and irony through the lack of a rhyme scheme and knowledge about the citizen to illustrate how the government knows many statistics and facts about the citizen; however, the government loses details about his personal life in the process.

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 series commands guide you spatially and logically through the scenes in the house, describing what is happening in an as-a-matter-of-fact manner. In the second stanza, the author instructs to “Take” (9), “spread” (12), and again “Let” (15). The sequence of commands is so frequently scrawled throughout the stanzas that this sense of being chaperoned becomes expected and fully accepted. The final commands at end of each stanza, “Let be be finale of seem” (7) and “Let the lamp affix its beam” (14), both relate to remaining firmly planted in reality. Line seven can be restated as 'allow things to be exactly as they seem. Don't try and explain them or give them unnecessary depth.' Line fifteen is a command to not be blind to the facts of reality. Lift the veil and behold the truth before you. Finally, the statement, “The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream” (8,16), which concludes each stanza in the poem, is a decree of a fact, which is made believable by the establishment of absolute influence by the speaker throughout the poem.

Firstly, he is very skeptical towards the planners who plan this idea of modernisation. The writer starts of the poem with ‘They plan.’ It is unclear of who the writer is referring to, which I imply that he is referring to the planners. The writer tries to distance himself from the planners, and does not want anything to do with them by not acknowledging who they are. Besides that, his second sentence of the poem is also related to them. The repetition of the word ‘They’ many times emphasises how powerful and mysterious are the people behind the city’s construction and to rebel against them would be practically impossible. Additionally, the speaker describes them as people who ‘build and will not stop’. Nothing has the power to stop the planners, it is a hopeless battle if anyone even attempts to rebel against this plan. There is a certainty about this sentence that