The connection between strange & individual suggests a different orientation for thinking about the meaning of “individual,” one that strikes me as very American, in the sense that in America (and in what I recall off the top of my head of Dylan-speak in interviews) the word “rugged” in “rugged individualism” is pretty redundant. That is, etymologically (and logically) individual means indivisible–can’t be broken down into parts. But association with “strange” also asserts that the indivisible individual can’t be absorbed or completely assimilated into anything else either–an individual can not be reduced to a mere part of something else, and so remains always somewhat “strange” (a word whose root, dictionary.com tells me, traces back through the Latin “extraneus” to “egh,” the Indo-European root for “out”).

What’s that you said about Dylan’s songs showing “new faces of familiar words?” You hit that nail on the head.

And one of the Dylan-specific points you make I really like is the “completeness and self-sufficiency of each fleeting and provisional self,” and especially the phrase “strange certainty.” I think here you are on to way of capturing something everybody has always known but never (before) been able to put their finger on: Dylan is always recognizably Dylan but he is also always reinventing himself. Your paragraph on this is the first time I can recall seeing these 2 apparently contradictory facts brought together and (somewhat) reconciled.

My own, somewhat cryptic (for which I apologize–I just can’t see the matter more clearly), contribution to this question is that Dylan makes us see that our individuality (which matters) is not personal (which does not matter).