The Unknown Citizen

How much control should the government have over its citizens' lives? How much conformity is beneficial to society and how much is a detrimental loss of a sense of self? W. H. Auden asks all these questions and more in his 1940 poem "The Unknown Citizen." In his extreme case of government control, a man's life is evaluated entirely upon how he conformed to society's expectations in his occupation, family, and even his opinions. Told in a cold, detached tone as if taken straight out of a government report, the poem will make you question how the government and conformity intersect and what effect that has on society.

The Unknown Citizen at a Glance

W. H. Auden's The Unknown Citizen

British-American poet W. H. Auden wrote his famous poem "The Unknown Citizen" shortly after he emigrated to the United States in 1939. It was first published in The New Yorker in January 1940 and then later republished in Auden's poetry collection Another Time, which came out later that year.

Auden was born in England in 1907, but he traveled extensively, eventually moving to the United States in 1939 less than a year before Britain entered into World War II. Auden hated the Nazis, their insistence on conformity, and the idea that Aryans were a superior race.

Radical communism was also on the rise in the Soviet Union and its allied countries, stressing the rule of the state over the individual. Although Auden's early views were largely influenced by Karl Marx's theories, he was wary of the standardization happening in Germany, the Soviet Union, and other communist countries.

Fig. 1 - Radical communism in the Soviet Union emphasized conformity to the state, of which Auden was deeply critical.

It is important to note that Auden was equally critical of capitalist consumerism and was disillusioned with the American Dream. This is shown throughout the poem, specifically with reference to Fudge Motors Inc., an allusion to Ford Motor Company, which was known for developing the assembly line mode of production and further standardizing products and labor.

Auden himself lived through both World Wars, in which soldiers died as a statistic and not as individual people. He witnessed the rise of Joseph Stalin's extreme communism and Adolf Hitler's extreme fascism. He also watched as America became increasingly more industrialized and productivity was defined by standardization. By the time he died in 1973, the entire world had undergone enormous social and political changes.

The Unknown Citizen Poem

The Unknown Citizen Summary

Reading like a passive report without any sign of human feeling, the speaker reflects on the life of an unknown dead man. The speaker states that the dead man was an exemplary citizen because he did everything correctly according to the government. No one ever made a complaint about him, he worked at the same job for all of his life, only leaving to serve in the war, he had a wife and five children which was the perfect number, and he owned all of the right things. He always had the correct view on the issues of the state, being a pacifist in times of peace and fighting for his country in times of war. He bought the newspaper every day and read it just like he was supposed to. He was only in the hospital once and he left there cured. He did everything correctly in order to serve his society and lived a perfect life. It is ridiculous to wonder if he was happy or free, the narrator states, because if anything was wrong with him the state surely would have known.

The Unknown Citizen Analysis

"The Unknown Citizen" uses several literary devices to position the poem as a satire not meant to be taken seriously. The most important of the literary devices are irony, allusion, and rhetorical question.

Irony

The entire poem, including the title, is full of irony. The title "The Unknown Citizen" and the epigraph ("JS/07 M378") at the beginning of the poem state that the dead man is obscure. But lines 1-29 of the poem detail every aspect of the "unknown" man's life from his job to his family to his friends to his consumer habits. While the government claims to know nothing about him, they have information on his entire life:

Far from unknown, the man seems to have nothing private for himself as the Bureau of Statistics, Social Psychology workers, The Press, his Health-card, Producers Research and High-Grade Living, Public Opinion researchers, the Eugenist, and his children's teachers all kept record of the various facets of his life. In fact, the only things that are actually unknown about him are his name and his individual thoughts and opinions. This shows that to the state, which is doing the reporting on the dead man, none of the things that set him apart as an individual are important. He might be a model member of society, but his identity as a person is largely wiped out.

The man is anonymous because he is just one person in a population of mass conformity. Everyone buys the exact same things, has the same opinions, and even has the same number of children to be considered exemplary. Because they are all the same, their names are insignificant if they are doing everything the state tells them to. Their identity is only important if they are doing things incorrectly and must be punished.

Allusion

This is an allusion to Ford Motor Company. Henry Ford revolutionized the production of automobiles in 1913 when he introduced the assembly line method of production. Instead of each employee working on everything, the assembly line meant that every worker was trained on one specific task, passing down the product until it was finally assembled as a whole. This decreased the time it took for a Ford automobile to be built from 12 hours down to an hour and 33 minutes.

The assembly line, however, stressed conformity and standardization. The workers were all cogs in the machine to their employers. If one person wasn't pulling their weight, they could simply be fired and replaced. This caused the United Auto Workers (UAW) labor organizers to begin pushing for unionization in 1937. Ford was strictly opposed to unions and at times met their protests with violence. After years of resistance, the Ford Motor Company became the last major automobile company to unionize in 1941.

The second allusion is to the Soviet Union's Five-Year Plans when the speaker states, "He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan" (19). Starting in the 1920s, the Soviet Union began implementing a series of economic plans with the hope of boosting the economy. The first plan, implemented by Stalin in 1928 focused on increasing industrialization and agriculture, but it came at the cost of consumer goods. The Soviet Union launched 13 five-year plans in total. Consumers and individual people often shouldered the majority of the loss in the name of economic growth.

Auden includes these allusions to critique both standardization in the United States and in the Soviet Union. He is wary of conformity and loss of identity both with extreme capitalism and extreme communism. In general, he notes that both countries are guilty of pushing their state's control and eroding their citizen's identity as individuals.

Metonymy

Metonymy occurs in how the speaker presents news organizations and propaganda:

The press refers to the media—journalists and editors—who disseminate news to the general population. Instead of being a group of diverse, unbiased journalists, however, metonymy groups all news sources and opinions together. This is useful in order to present "the press" as a all-powerful organization which has complete control over the news and is able to feed ordinary people propaganda that they accept as law. The man's obedience in buying a paper every day and reacting to propaganda exactly as he's expected to also shows that he lacks original thought and simply believes what he is told.

Fig. 2 - "The Press" is a metonymy for journalists who control the flow of information and make the citizens believe whatever they tell them.

Rhetorical Question

The speaker uses rhetorical questions to further take away the autonomy of the unknown citizen:

Alliteration

Alliteration calls attention to certain pairings of words, making them stand out and emphasizing their importance over others. Consider the repetition of the "F" sound here:

The alliteration groups together the words "factory," "fired" and "Fudge (Motors)," emphasizing their importance. In this society where a good life means doing everything the government tells you to, the most important thing a person can do is fit into the status quo. It also emphasized the power of Fudge Motors Inc. because they are backed by the government. If the man did not satisfy his employer, the government would have a very different opinion on his life.

Fig. 3 - The speaker stresses that the citizen is good because he worked in a factory, producing goods for an automobile company every day of his life.

Alliteration, while naturally rhythmic, counterintuitively contributes to the monotonous tone of the poem. When alliteration happens in the same spaced out, lazy way several times in a row, it's effect becomes expected and tedious.

The "P" sound in line 14, "A" sound in line 15, "P" sound in line 16, and "H" sound in line 17 are interspersed at almost the exact same intervals. The repetition of the letters is spread out long enough that these lines aren't sing-songy, and instead they mimic a emotionless job being done again and again at regular intervals (like stapling or stamping a paper).

Caesura

Caesura creates breaks in the middle of a sentence, often for a natural stopping place. In "The Unknown Citizen," however, caesura is used for emphasis to show how much power the bureaucracy has over ordinary citizens. Consider line 24:

The breaks after "when there was peace" and "when there was war" show that the government is really controlling force the citizens. The statements are straightforward and matter of fact: when his country decided it needed him to act one way or the other he did it. The government control over the breaks and pauses in the sentences as well as control over its citizens' lives. Caesura again shows the power the bureaucracy has in the last line:

The insistence that nothing was wrong and the stop in the middle of the sentence is one last reminder of who is in charge.

Enjambment and end stop

The majority of the lines are end stopped, meaning the thought ends with the line instead of spilling over into the next line. This reflects the idea that everything in the poem is standardized and controlled by bureaucracy or some kind of higher force. Consider the final seven lines of the poem:

Every single one of these lines ends with some kind of punctuation. The pace of the poem is strictly controlled and words are very purposefully delivered, which ultimately reflects the speaker's control over everything in society, from this poem/report to each individual citizen.

Tone and vocabulary

The speaker's tone throughout the poem is emotionless, monotonous, and somewhat dead-sounding. The distinct lack of poetic language, most notably imagery, is an important stylistic choice. Instead of the speaker being a living, breathing person, the tone and vocabulary makes it seem more like a machine or computer. Consider the use of "we" and "our" throughout the poem. The speaker is a collective that is above the humans it watches every single day. Phrases like "our Eugenist" and "our teachers" position people as something the speakers possess.

The vocabulary also sets the speaker and its affiliates apart from the people they control. Words like "Greater Community," "Social Psychology," and "Public Opinion" are all capitalized, making them proper nouns. As proper nouns, these things become physical things that the speaker can use and manipulate.

The Unknown Citizen Themes

The major themes in the poem are conformity, standardization, and loss of self as well as state control and dominion.

Conformity, standardization, and loss of self

The unknown citizen is praised for his exemplary life because of his ability to conform to society's standards. He was a model citizen, not because he was happy or fulfilled, but because he did everything he was supposed to. He is praised, not because of who he was as a person, but because of his lack of personal sentiments. The speaker states,

Notice that he's not a saint because of any goods acts or morality. Instead, he is a good person because his life was consumed by this bigger-than-thou force, "the Greater Community." The man doesn't even have a name; he doesn't have any physical description or desires or ambitions. Any of those things might have detracted from his ability to serve the community as a mindless follower. In this dystopia, the best quality a person can have is a complete and utter lack of self and desire to conform.

State control and dominion of bureaucracy

As the citizens have no sense of self, the state is free to take control over every aspect of everyday life. And the bureaucracy doesn't just control jobs, medicine, and jail-time. On the contrary, the state has dominion over every aspect of a person's life, deciding what is right or wrong and using that decision to complete dictate a person's value in society. The state monitored the man's opinions:

They also deem how many kids is acceptable based on eugenics:

All in all, the state controlled every aspect of his life from his job to his children to his opinions and beliefs. Nothing is out of their control, and even in death they are free to judge the deceased based on their compliance to society's expectations.