Rather than providing a linear narrative, Dylan freewheels through the nine verses in an apparently random order. Like Desolation Row and Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues the song creates a world with its own internal rationale, peopled by symbolic ‘cartoon characters’ who make brief entrances and exits. As in It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding) (also addressed to an invisible ‘mother figure’) it presents a picture of modern life as stifling, oppressive and highly illogical. But the desperate tension of that song is now replaced by a gleeful comic detachment. Dream, fantasy and hallucination appear to dictate the picture Dylan builds up of a world in which conventional reason is upended or reversed.
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