Although much of Dylan’s catalogue is comprised of songs that expose the metanarratives and mythologies that we unknowingly live under, I have chosen to analyze "Forever Young" because it unabashedly propagates and continues the negative metanarratives and mythologies that drive our culture. Or, does it? 

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Barthes explains the concept of rhetoric as "a set of fixed, regulated, insistent figures, according to which the varied forms of the mythical signifier arrange themselves....It is through their rhetoric that bourgeois myths outline the general prospect of this pseudo-physis which defines the dream of the contemporary bourgeois world" (150). I can think of no better dream of the contemporary bourgeois world than the idea that we can remain forever young. We are bombarded by this dream or myth in our everyday lives from commercials that promote anti-aging serums that will expose younger looking skin or little blue pills that will keep you going like a young man. And we are told stories of the mythic quest for the fountain of youth or places like Neverland in literature and we watch movies where parents swap lives with their younger children. As a society, we buy into this mythology and begin to absorb it as part of our nature—that if we try hard enough, we won’t have to accept that our bodies are inevitably decaying with every passing day. Barthes recognizes this freezing of the unnatural into the natural when he explains “the very principle of myth” and how “it transforms history into nature. We now understand why, in the eyes of the myth-consumer, the intention, the adhomination of the concept can remain manifest without however appearing to have an interest in the matter: what causes mythical speech to be uttered is perfectly explicit, but it is immediately frozen into something natural; it is not read as a motive, but as a reason” (129). We begin to reason with ourselves that it is natural that we should want to remain young and not live our lives as a depressing march toward death.

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With regards to Dylan’s lyrics in "Forever Young," it is interesting to note that Barthes argues that poetic language should resist myth because it relies on abstraction rather than associated meanings, which is “the essentialist ambitions of poetry, the conviction that it alone catches the thing in itself” (133). However, Dylan’s poetic lyrics in "Forever Young" may sound like a heartfelt benediction, but it also seems to propagate the American myth that we can remain forever young—in fact, he is wishing that myth on his audience. After analyzing much of Dylan’s work, I don’t think that he would blindly attempt to disseminate such a popular and perhaps dangerous myth to his audience. Perhaps Dylan is using this song as a way to expose and implode the myth itself. Barthes himself recognizes that “the best weapon against myth is perhaps to mythify it in its turn, and to produce an artificial myth: and this reconstituted myth will in fact be a mythology. Since myth robs language of something, why not rob myth?” (135). By looking at the song from this perspective, then perhaps Dylan and Barthes may be more in accord than I originally thought. If Dylan, the sneaky rhetorician that he is, is attempting to mythify the myth of eternal youth, then "Forever Young" can be read as an admonition to our youth-obsessed culture by glorifying and extolling it through popular song.

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972.