To accompany the songbook of "Blonde on Blonde", Paul Nelson wrote an introduction stating, "The very title suggests the singularity and the duality we expect from Dylan. For Dylan's music of illusion and delusion—with the tramp as explorer and the clown as happy victim, where the greatest crimes are lifelessness and the inability to see oneself as a circus performer in the show of life—has always carried within it its own inherent tensions ... Dylan in the end truly UNDERSTANDS situations, and once one truly understands anything, there can no longer be anger, no longer be moralizing, but only humor and compassion, only pity." In May 1968 for "Esquire", Robert Christgau said Dylan had "presented his work at its most involuted, neurotic, and pop—and exhilarating—in "Blonde on Blonde"."