Rolling like a stone: A review of 'Like A Rolling Stone'

How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone.

This is cynical Dylan probably at his best. He shouts out in spoken verse to question his generation. And the strange part is even though it is meant for Dylan's generation, even I can answer this long-but-simple question.

The answer is, it feels scary, it feels scary to be on your own, with no direction for home, like a complete unknown. The identity crisis which the post-war generations of Europe and America had to face, is being felt by us today. It is understandable that if today a new Dylan was born in this pora kopaler desh then probably he would have also written a song of this stature.

'Like a Rolling Stone' is a simple song chronicling the life of a certain Miss Lonely who went to fine schools, who dined with high society friends, who dressed herself in fine loins. But now she has to face the hard, cold, bitter world which awaits with knife and fork in hand to dine on her, after she has been robbed by her lovers and officials of every penny. Till this day she had been fooling life and in subtler terms, herself with the help of all the extravagance, she had been hiding her weakness from the world, but now that she is penniless she has to earn her right to live in the tough way. 'Like a Rolling Stone' deals with the issues of loss of innocence, the tough journey of life, and not knowing who you are.

But somewhere Dylan also highlights and glorifies the life of a nobody, with nothing, when he says-

When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose

You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

And this way he changes the whole course of the song from the tale of utter failure to the accounts of hope and faith on the human habit of struggle.

But it is the last four lines of the song, the chorus which helps to elevate the song from accounts of a stupid generation to the concerns of a bunch of stupid nobody generations.

How does it feel to be like a rolling stone?
It feels sad.