The poem starts to speed up at this point, it starts to rhyme, this makes the information seem unimportant, compared to the statistics that we learned about earlier on in the poem.
We learn that the Unknown Citizen has never been fired and that he was satisfactory, at first I thought that this was ok, but after further analysis I seen that the fact he got fired was a negative, the way that it is wrote out, instead of him staying at the same company the author says he never got fired, It also talks about how he was satisfactory. This man is getting a monument to him in his honour for being satisfactory?
Yet again there is another report on him, this time from his Union. At first it when it talks about "Our report shows it was sound" I thought nothing of it, but further readings of it talks about the Union being sound, generally Unions are opposed to the Government, it looks as if this Union is sanctioned by the Government.
Yet again there is report about him, but this time it is from the Social Psychologist, they delve into every facet of your life, from your professional life to your home life. They social psychologist does not report on you, he/she spies on you, on what you do, wear, act and think.
The Unknown Citizen is a regular guy, he is popular with his mates, he likes a drink he is a normal guy. So if they had a report on the regular average guy, then they would have a report on everyone, I realised this after 2 or 3 reads of the poem. The Unknown Citizen is boring, predictable, he never done anything different and yet he is getting a statue erected in his honour.
The newspapers had a report on him as well, it suggests that the important part of the papers were the adverts, I did not realise this at the time but if the adverts are the most important part of the newspaper then they will have very little news in them.
When the poem says "And his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way" this suggests that there is a normal reaction to an advert, I realised that they must spy on people to see what the normal reaction to certain situations. In our lives today a lot of money is spent on advertising, companies change their names to make their product more appealing, they don’t just change it at a whim though, they will spend a lot on psychologists to predict what names will be good for their product and which ones wont be, to see how our reactions will be. You think that this society where Social Psychologists spy on them is far away but it is closer than you think. I started to realise this more and more as we got nearer the end of the poem.
The Unknown Citizen is predictable; he does what he is told.
They talk about how he left hospital cured, either the society was in such good health that they never had to go to hospital or the hospitals are so good that people are treated quickly and effectively. What I didn’t realise was that to think about what hospital was it, was it a psychiatric hospital, and if so if he went there he must have done something unpredictable and was then cured by the state.
When it says that he was "fully sensible to advantages of the Instalment Plan" I didn’t really take much notice of it, but again after further examination if it is an Instalment Plan then that means that he be in debt that means that he had to get a job to pay for the loan. So the Unknown Citizen does what he is told because he can't afford to lose his job, if he did then he would lose everything he has.
The State has it so that everyone is in debt, so they stay in control.
It talks about the necessities that they need for Modern Man, but the things that he has aren’t actually essential to living, a car, a fridge, a radio aren’t actually necessities. To be classed as modern you need this stuff and to have this stuff you need to be a part of the instalment plan.
This part I got straight away when it talks about he had the proper opinions for the time of year, as we have talked about him doing what he is told you start to realise that the State think for him, they tell him what to think, and he does it without hesitation for fear of the State. When there was war he went without asking questions - he would do what he was told even thought that might mean his death.
He was married, which was probably condoned by the State, and added the right number of children to the population, which a Eugenist has verified. Yet again he did what he was told, even when it came to adding life to the world.
It asks if he was happy and if he was free, to our society these are two of the most basic necessities to have, but in the poem you hear no mention of them, but when it says, "the question is absurd" I think this means that these two qualities don’t exist in this society.
On the last line it talks about "If anything had been wrong, we should certainly have heard" is yet again negative, the whole poem talks about what he didn’t do, not what he did do.
In conclusion in this poem we expected the Unknown Citizen to have done something great but we learn nothing about him, we learn nothing about his character because he probably didn’t have any, he done everything he was supposed to do. This society is a totalitarian regime, the people are totally led and have no freedom of thought. You reject the poem because you reject the society that he lives in; it is boring to show what kind of society that he lives in. The poem is not that far flung, as you would like it to be, for example in Russia and China. In The Unknown Citizens Society his choices have been taking away.
