I turned my collar to the cold and damp.
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light,.
That split the night.
And touched the Sound of Silence.
The speaker dreams of escape from this listless weariness brought about by the creeping vision. He walked the "narrow streets of cobblestones,"" symbolizing oppression as was suggested by the narrowness of a street made up of cobblestones, indicative of it's ancientness, or the "old ways."" The walking part is more of an implied expression of a desire to escape from unconsciousness. Under the "halo of a street lamp- he turned from "the cold and damp."" This is now the boundary between the old and the new streets of society. A mild and soothing light was surrounding him before he turned, only to be "stabbed by the flash of a neon light."" Light was, in literary sense, a symbol of clarity and reality. Neon, unnatural colors that are produced from the combination of primary to secondary colors, is a symbol, then, of artificiality and of breaking away from the traditional. Neon lights are, therefore, a corruption of that reality. .
The flash almost blinded him as his eyes "were stabbed- by this artificiality, the dehumanizing effects of modernism. It touched the realms of his prison cell, and it almost crushed its walls and released him.
And in the naked night I saw.
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking,.
People hearing without listening.
People writing songs that voices never share.
No one dared disturb the Sound of Silence.
This is a common affliction of a city life "people lose individuality instead of honing them. In the "naked night- he saw all those people who profess knowledge in talking but has nothing to say, really; people who claims wisdom but are incapable of understanding; and those that write songs, or poems, but has no meaning as no voice shares with it, no language to use. A lack of the freedom of movement.
