"Folk songs are evasive -- the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that's exactly the way we want it to be."
-- Bob Dylan, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE

How many personas does Bob Dylan have?

How many pages are there in a book? Or days in a year? Or, perhaps most important, how many songs in a story?

"A folk song," Dylan writes in his new book, CHRONICLES: VOLUME ONE, "has over a thousand faces, and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff."

CHRONICLES was cited as one of THE NEW YORK TIMES's 10 most notable books of the past year and in January was named one of the finalists for the National Book Critics Circle prize in the category of biography/autobiography.

It is, perhaps, a fitting tribute to a writer and performer who over the course of his nearly 45-year career has become one of the world's most important cultural figures. By the sheer magnitude of his talent and duration of his survival, Dylan is now an entertainment icon and elder statesman whose Delphic riddling rhymes and gnomic puns are no longer part of the countercultural margins but are sought out by such paragons of mainstream culture as 60 MINUTES and NEWSWEEK magazine.

His influence has extended well beyond the United States and well beyond his chosen genre of songwriting to literature, film, politics, and religion. His work and his many personae are, at turns, not only insightful and inspirational, wise, difficult, and mysterious but also contradictory, inconsistent and, yes, self-serving.

As he approaches his 64th birthday, one is tempted to speculate that he is also tamed, enjoying a new kind of fame -- that of the establishment. Yet such acceptance -- an honorary Ph.D. from Princeton, a set of Grammys, a Kennedy Center Honors award from President Clinton, among many other accolades after a decade and a half of being dismissed as passé and something of a has-been -- has made Dylan no easier to understand, no easier to parse, and no less compelling a writer, one who both shapes and is shaped by the best and worst of America.

You can pick your badge of honor or outrage. He sang in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, denounced the war in Vietnam, embraced a strident and judgmental Protestant fundamentalism, lauded the poetry of the gay Beat and Buddhist poet Allen Ginsberg, condemned corporate greed, remained silent on Central America, celebrated Zionist nationalism, failed to credit members of the band on one of his major albums, and appeared in a Victoria's Secret lingerie commercial.

As attention again focuses on him, the critical debates also rage about who he is, what his work means, and what of his vast oeuvre matters.

He is hailed, but not unanimously, as a superb songwriter and musician and lauded as one of the best poets of the second half of the 20th century. He is the subject of dozens of books and hundreds of academic articles and numerous college courses. Most recently, suggesting the range of treatment Dylan elicits from scholars, literary critic Christopher Ricks has published DYLAN'S VISION OF SIN and New Testament scholar Michael J. Gilmour has written TANGLED UP IN THE BIBLE: BOB DYLAN AND SCRIPTURE. Additionally, a more complete edition of his song lyrics has been published, providing both fans and scholars ready access to the songs as written (but not necessarily as performed).

Over the years, Dylan has refused to be confined to the boxes into which his fans -- and sometimes critics -- seek to put him, whether political, religious, or even musical. He seems almost a caricature of the American Adam, constantly reinventing his public and musical self, always ready, like Huck Finn, "to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest" when Aunt Sally and "sivilization" (his fans and critics) threaten to hem him in. We all should have learned by now that "he not busy being born is busy dying."

Still, as a late 20th-century version of Walt Whitman, the poet he perhaps most emulates, he has consistencies and repeated themes in his many selves and their reinventions, whether amid the radicalism of the 1960s or the religiosity of the 1980s. From his first recordings, when he was still apprenticing himself to the folk and blues traditions, religious concerns and moral motifs have permeated the work as they do those musical traditions. Religious and biblical language has been a consistent but always complex and sometimes contradictory element. As he said in a 1963 interview, "There's mystery, magic, truth, and the Bible in great folk music. I can't hope to touch that. But I'm going to try."

Such language seems to run through his work in the way theologians once talked about some "red thread" versions of the Bible used to denote the words of Jesus. Religious and biblical language has been part of the many public versions of Dylan, whether political, religious, countercultural, or minstrel. He may well be among the last generation for whom biblical language is a normal part of literary allusion and discourse and not an affectation or a necessary signal of a dogmatic belief system.

Thus it is important to note that at root, as English critic Michael Gray has pointed out, Dylan is a moralist rather than the prophet many of his fans, both secular and religious, have longed for. His songs are about the struggle for a moral code, and it is, ultimately, the music that provides his religious framework. As Gray puts it in his important study of Dylan, SONG AND DANCE MAN III, "Along with this unfailing sense of the need for moral clarity, Dylan's work has also been consistently characterized by a yearning for salvation. In fact the quest for salvation might well be called the central theme of Bob Dylan's entire output. To survive, you must attain that clarity of morality: you won't even get by without going that far, and then you must go beyond -- get rescued from the chaos and purgatory and find some spiritual home."

Dylan's use of religious motifs and biblical imagery has sparked a host of commentaries and critical analyses, many by evangelical Christians. As fans and critics in the 1960s sought to make Dylan a spokesman for a generation involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements (a role he ultimately rejected, as he writes movingly but not always convincingly in CHRONICLES), so too many evangelicals welcomed his celebrated conversion to fundamentalist Christianity and sought to define the minstrel as minister. For a brief period after his 1978 conversion, Dylan appeared willing to play that role, sometimes preaching from the stage, just as he had, for an equally brief time, embraced the persona of himself as the reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, social critic.