The Unity of "Howl"

The second and third parts of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" serve to further the themes in the initial part through the use of metaphor. In the second part, the nameless aggressor against whom the "best minds of my generation" (9) are fighting is given a name and an identity. Molech is the aggressor, the embodiment of "absolute reality" (16), of war and law and industry. Ginsberg says of this entity: "Molech who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!" (22). The civilized world is Molech, and it is against the constraints and the repurcussions of Molech that the people in the first part are fighting against. They cannot fight as against a person, for Molech is not a person, but rather something far more encompassing than that. So they fight within the mind, they fight for dominance over their own, individual mental processes, through the use of drugs and sex and travel. Essentially, Molech is the lie of reality that blinds everyone to the truth of spirituality. The difficulty lies in subverting Molech, and in the end both the first and second parts of the peom, we can understand that Molech can be avoided by death (whether physically or mentally) or by the agonizing creation of something true from within.
The third part narrows the focus, and metamorphoses Molech into Rockland, the mental institution. Rockland also stands as a metaphor for, literally, "the institution", that is civilization. Yet, under the tyranny of Rockland, Ginsberg asserts that the inhabitants are not facing the fight alone, and yet they are still highly individualized. Under Molech, each person has to fight alone, and under the nameless forces in the first part, the individual is lost, becoming instead a collective force. So the poem moves from unity to individual to unified individuals. Ginsberg repeats "I'm with you in Rockland" (24), speaking to Carl Soloman, as a way of saying that though Soloman is literally alone, he is not spiritually alone.
One of the images from the first part is repeated here, in the third part: the pingpong game. In the first part, the unified fighters "in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table" (18). The game of pingpong stands for the fight against reality and law, while the pingpong table is the field upon which the fight rages, the mind. The fighters understand that overturning the physical table is only symbolic, and thus are not overly concerned with pingpong. In Rockland, however, "you scream in a straightjacket that you're losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss" (25). No longer are the indivdual fighters able to nonchalantly overturn pingpong tables and then ignore them. Now the game is real, and has become a battle to the death on the battlefield of the mind, a battle like that against Molech, a battle where losing means being dragged into the abyss of either death or life under the oppressive reality.