by Kerry Michael Wood

Created on: July 10, 2010

The Unknown Citizen  of W. H. Auden's poem is unknown because his name has become unimportant. He lived, he followed the conventional beliefs of his time, he functioned in a factory. He was never fired, worked satisfactorily, and he paid his union dues. He was popular with his co-workers and would join them occasionally for an after-work drink. Furthermore, he subscribed to a daily paper, responded to advertisements as the advertisers would expect him to respond, was fully insured, was hospitalized once and was pronounced cured. He needs no other name than Modern Man.

He owned a phonograph, a radio (this being before the time of television), an automobile and a frigidaire. He was absolutely average in his political opinions, his marriage, and the number of his offspring. He was in favor of peace in peacetime, of war during wartime, and he agreed with whatever the government said was right for his children's education.

Then come the key questions. "Was he free? Was he happy?" Such questions are absurd, since had he not felt free and happy some government agency would have been informed. He might then even have had a given name and surname to distinguish him from all of the other cookie cutter drones working at Fudge Motors, Inc or whatever factory.

The society described by Auden is as terrifyingly real as is his individual Unknown Citizen. First there is the faceless Bureau of Statistics, his nameless Union, a group of Social Psychology workers, and  the Press, If there is a political division in the press, as would be expected, such division has been eliminated. Producers Research and High-Grade Living are equally without character as is the Eugenist who passes an opinion on Modern Man's number of offspring. Similarly, "our teachers" are a bloc indistinguishable one from another.

In this society so alarmingly close to our own, the individual under consideration has been reduced to a set of numbers. He can be  a "saint" because he has lived a life totally devoted not to God but to the Greater Community. Nowhere in the most unpoetic of poems is there reference to matters of philosophy, creativity, noteworthiness or individuality. The Unknown Citizen consumes without complaint. He disappears at poem's conclusion without having developed height, weight, skin color, hobby, or any similar feature that provides the reader with the means to form a mental picture of any sort.

How many Fudge Motors employees, undescribable even when we are looking at them, do we all know?

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