I originally was going to analyze “All Along the Watchtower” through the theories of Nietzsche since the song is rife with history and images of things past; however, I think that Derrida’s ideas on deconstruction, hierarchy, and never-ending texts seem more appropriate for this haunting song. Derrida explores this concept of a never-ending text when he claims, “all these texts, which are doubtless the interminable preface to another text that one day I would like to have the force to write, or still the epigraph to another that I would never have the audacity to write” (5). He sees writing and texts themselves as a never-ending process because meaning is always deferred. There is no way to grasp the intended meaning before that meaning also changes because the words, and therefore the texts themselves, can never be understood in exactly the same manner. This deferral of meaning is what Derrida is trying to explain when he again gives his definition for différance. Derrida defines différance as “the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other” and he sees it as “a becoming-space which makes possible both writing and every correspondence between speech and writing, every passage from one to the other” (27). Therefore, it is necessary that we deconstruct meaning in order to begin to recognize and understand those traces of difference in language and in texts.

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This never-ending process of meaning in texts is demonstrated with the structure of the narrative in “All Along the Watchtower.” Dylan’s howling harmonica sets the background for the story of the joker and the thief who wanted to find a way out of “here” because they are dissatisfied with the order of things in the figurative kingdom. Dylan uses the entirety of the song to set the scene for the listener, but what is of interest for rhetoric, and perhaps Derridean in a sense, is that he only begins the story at the end of the song. It is up to the listener to construct the story of the two riders approaching the castle—the listener has to do the “work” of making up the story. Furthermore, in comparison to some of his other songs, the language in this poem is sparse with only sixteen lines to the entire song. In a 1968 interview, Dylan admitted that "what I’m trying to do now is not use too many words. There’s no line that you can stick your finger through, there’s no hole in any of the stanzas. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.” However, it's up to the listener to determine what that something is. I think that this is what Derrida was proposing when he explained deconstruction as not just examining the layers of meaning, but more about the action itself of the individual making meaning—it requires work. In “All Along the Watchtower,” the listener not only has to make meaning from the metaphor-imbued lyrics, but he also has to determine how the story ends itself (although Derrida would say that the story never ends at all).

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Another Derridean infusion in “All Along the Watchtower” is the attempt to overturn the existing “violent hierarchy” (41). If we read the castle with its “princes” and “barefoot servants” as the existing power structure, then we can also read the joker and the thief as attempting to disrupt that existing power structure. It is only when the two men begin to approach the castle that wildcats begin to growl and the winds pick up, which can be interpreted as an omen of potential violence or chaos with their arrival. Derrida believed that in order “to deconstruct the opposition, first of all, is to overturn the hierarchy at a given moment. To overlook this phase of overturning is to forget the conflictual and subordinating structure of the opposition” (41). In other words, in order to begin the work of making meaning in language, we must first overturn the current power structure and try to figure a way out of the existing hegemony. This overturn or dismissal of the hegemonic powers that be may be exactly what Dylan the rhetorician was thinking when the joker claimed that "there must be some kind of way out of here" or when he sang  "although the masters make the rules for the wise men and the fools--I've got nothing, Ma, to live up to" in "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)." Dylan as well as Derrida believed that we must overturn those existing power structure in order to understand the complexities within.



Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Trans.  Alan Bass. Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1981.