Satan Whispers: Bob Dylan and Paradise Lost

Throughout his song-writing career, from a variety of interrelated perspectives, Dylan has explored the discords of a fallen world. This exploration has frequently been undertaken within religious terms deriving from the Judaism which he inherited and the Christianity which, for a number of years, he explicitly adopted. A great number of Dylan's highly allusive songs move between the bounds of these mutually implicated traditions, and this essay explores one of the principal anxieties driving that dimension of his work: a dread of being permanently alienated from the divine.