W.H. Auden wrote "The Unknown Citizen" in 1939 when Western Europe was on the verge of another war and United States was on the verge of economic boom, industrialism, materialism and bureaucracy. As a resource for his creation, he adopted the cultural practice of the monument and the tomb of the Unknown soldier" as a text-type and re-contextualized it in order to serve a new purpose in the modern life. In fact, Auden wedged a critical reading into the inter-text of the known soldier. The outcome is a poem which is not only a parody of the epitaph to the Unknown Soldier but also is a brief but informative account of the manufacturing of the citizen in contemporary Western community. Auden produces the cultural practice or the textual monument of the Unknown Citizen to be juxtaposed with the Unknown Soldier in dedication to the 'services' done by both soldier (a hero) and citizen (a functionary), a kind of anticlimax. The present paper aims at investigating the citizen-building strategies which are parodied in Auden's poem. With this in view, the paper avails itself of the theory of intertextuality, parody, Judith Butler's performativity and Jennifer Gore's coding categories (1993) of surveillance, normalization, exclusion,distribution, classification, individualization, totalization, regulation derived from Foucault's Discipline and Punish to find out , firstly, how Auden demystifies citizenship; secondly, how government constructs citizen; and finally, which technologies of disciplining mentioned above are mostly used and why.
