At first glance, Big Thick Rod might look like a play filled with penis jokes and double entendres. Which it is. But it's also something more. The play's outrageousness, its seeming silliness, serve to heighten the effectiveness of its treatment of much darker themes. Below, we go deeper with Big Thick Rod.

Rod goes deeper

Dramaturgical Context | Thematic Issues | W.H. Auden | Larger Significance

W.H. Auden

"Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation, a mental or physical barter, to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods."

The above quotation is lifted from an essay entitled “Hic et Ille,” which roughly translates to "This one or that one." The essay is very much about dichotomies between things -- the two sides that exist to nearly everything. This incorporates many themes and ideas which are relevant to studies of BIG THICK ROD as well:

Pride (particularly, the sin of Pride) as a kind of Mirror. Auden mentions how an artist could depict all of the other Seven Deadly Sins, but for this one, he'd need to replace his canvas with a mirror
The myth of Narcissus (If you wish to read the myth: http://www.historylink102.com/greece2/echo_narcissus.htm)
Auden writes, “Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.” Auden is reminding us of the individual’s ultimate self-involvement, and how a person will love himself better than anything outside of his own being. There is, in this understanding, a greater love of self than there could ever be of another.
Dispute with the psychoanalytic model, particularly the Freudian concept of sexual transference or substitution, whereby certain banal images are standing in symbolically for specific sexual imagery. Auden points out, “If all round hills were suddenly to turn into breasts, all caves into wombs, all towers into phalloi, we should not be pleased or even shocked: we would be bored.” Auden is reminding his reader that the reason the actual sexual symbols are thrilling is because they are not present everywhere, they are not necessarily part of the everyday. If every image that was seen were a sexual one, sexual images would become ordinary and would likely cease to be sources of pleasure.
The idea that one cannot really recognize the Self in one's own reflection – there is some dichotomy between the body and face and the mind and feelings (one’s thoughts). Auden considers, “But it is impossible for me not to feel that my body is other than I, that I inhabit it like a house, and that my face is a mask which, with or without my consent, conceals my real nature from others.” Auden sees his internal identity as the reality of his Self; the body in which he moves through the physical world is merely a casing for that intangible identity.
This idea also has a possible connection to the complexity of notions of desire – how there can be something attractive about someone who, physically, may not be traditionally desirable – that, in a sense, the internal, metaphysical identities of people are what really draws them together, not just physical lust.
The prefacing quotation is part of a longer section, which ends on the following concept: If you do something good for someone, he/she may come to expect you to do it regularly; when you cease doing that good deed, despite all of the good deeds you may have done for the person in the past, you become an enemy.

Dramaturgical Context | Thematic Issues | W.H. Auden | Larger Significance