Dylan turns 60 Thursday. Is he sad? Pathetic? Mighty? Indomitable? It's tough to tell. You can think about Dylan in any number of ways on any given day or at any given time. Start with the five verses of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," his first epic songwriting effort. It's a simple story: A guy gets up, goes out, comes back. What did you see? his father asks. The singer tells him. What did you hear? What are you going to do now?

In the decades since he wrote it, Dylan has retold that tale several times, with all sorts of twists -- it's the story of "Tangled Up in Blue," his most exhilarating love affair, and of "Isis," his most murderous one.

I left; I saw stuff; I came back. Dylan -- a paragon of self-invention if there ever was one -- has had a lifelong thing for doubles, mirrors and doppelgängers: The person who comes back is changed, in essence a different person, a double. His recurring use of the tale of the journey lets Dylan leverage that double in all sorts of ways. In "Hard Rain," the singer, grandiose and full of himself, becomes a prophet in a time of torment. In much the same way, Dylan himself became an uncertain, and perhaps unwilling, spokesman for a restless, migrant generation, one more self-consciously aware of itself as "special" than any other.

Yet it's important to remember that Dylan was slightly detached from his generation, imbued as he was in both '50s rock and the pre-rock 'n' roll Dust Bowl poesy of Woody Guthrie. He was once Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing, Minn., and unquestionably hardened by his own abrupt departure from home, family and childhood in his late teens. By 1966, the rechristened Bob Dylan was 25 and already fully reinvented when a great wave of kids embraced civil rights, free speech and the fight against the Vietnam War.

But he understood the urge to move.

Dylan saw the transformation of his own life and those of the fans before him; he understood that you leave behind a version of yourself when you go, and that a new one is created along the way. The idea sang in his head, and reverberated in a generation's. In "Hard Rain," the most immature of journey songs, yet still the most visionary, he takes this to an extreme. Hidden in a catalog of nuclear horror and social breakdown is something more prosaic: an adolescent's dream of adulthood, when a father is turned into a straight man so the child, newly adult, can tell of the wondrous things he's seen and, not least, brag of the things he's going to do to make everything all right.

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Is that the point of the traveler's yearning for home? To experience it as a different person, to change the past by bringing to bear new skills and knowledge against it? A trip like this is a species of self-hatred, a rejection of self, something most everyone goes through on the road to adulthood. It also contains echoes of that American jones -- the journey west (fueled by a hunger for what's just out of view), finding an extreme, running until you can't go anywhere else.

The career of Bob Dylan -- 40 years, 40-plus albums, hundreds and hundreds of recorded songs, 1,500 or more live performances -- is broad enough to encompass anything from the trivial to the minute. Dylan is a rocker, a visionary, a poet; a persuasive student of folk and blues, a beautiful songwriter, a rebel; the coolest, most detached of stars, and maybe the cruelest. And among other things he's the man who first burst pop's optimistic bubble, who told the audience something it didn't want to hear.

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