A Picaresque Reading of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957)
A. Brief Information about Jack Kerouac and the Novel
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922 and died in Florida in 1969. Having attended Columbia University where he met the members of the group what would later be called the Beat Generation and some of them would appear as characters in his novel On the Road. However, as it is stated in the introduction part for the novel, ‘’Kerouac, at the age of nineteen, decided that he didn’t need to finish college because ‘he had his own mind.’ He wanted to become ‘an adventurer or a traveler,’ so that he could be a great American novelist in the tradition of Jack London and Thomas Wolfe’’ (Charters x). In 1951, Jack Kerouac began …show more content…
Under the administration of McCarthy, a sense of conformity or uniformity spread through the American society against the Communism. However, not all the American people obey the conformist patterns of cultural norms. Some of the writers, such as the members of the Beat Generation, which was a literary and cultural movement stemmed in New York and was used firstly by John C. Holmes in his novel Go (1952) that rejected all the conventional values and celebrated jazz, different sexual experiences, use of drug. Jack Kerouac coined the term ‘’beat’’ which means ‘’tired’’ or ‘’beaten down.’’ Emphasizing on spirituality and spontaneity, they preferred intuition over reason, Eastern mysticism over institutionalized Western religion. Beatnics prided themselves upon non-conformity, rebellion and a rejection of the superficiality and hypocrisy of the consumer culture. On the Road, which can be called as the Bible of the Beats, celebrated individualism and lonely quest for the identity without any need of stability and security. They were challenging the form and values of middle-class culture. They founded a different kind of life style of their own which appealed sex, drugs, jazz and material simplicity. As Yeşim Başarır
A. Brief Information about Jack Kerouac and the Novel
Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922 and died in Florida in 1969. Having attended Columbia University where he met the members of the group what would later be called the Beat Generation and some of them would appear as characters in his novel On the Road. However, as it is stated in the introduction part for the novel, ‘’Kerouac, at the age of nineteen, decided that he didn’t need to finish college because ‘he had his own mind.’ He wanted to become ‘an adventurer or a traveler,’ so that he could be a great American novelist in the tradition of Jack London and Thomas Wolfe’’ (Charters x). In 1951, Jack Kerouac began …show more content…
Under the administration of McCarthy, a sense of conformity or uniformity spread through the American society against the Communism. However, not all the American people obey the conformist patterns of cultural norms. Some of the writers, such as the members of the Beat Generation, which was a literary and cultural movement stemmed in New York and was used firstly by John C. Holmes in his novel Go (1952) that rejected all the conventional values and celebrated jazz, different sexual experiences, use of drug. Jack Kerouac coined the term ‘’beat’’ which means ‘’tired’’ or ‘’beaten down.’’ Emphasizing on spirituality and spontaneity, they preferred intuition over reason, Eastern mysticism over institutionalized Western religion. Beatnics prided themselves upon non-conformity, rebellion and a rejection of the superficiality and hypocrisy of the consumer culture. On the Road, which can be called as the Bible of the Beats, celebrated individualism and lonely quest for the identity without any need of stability and security. They were challenging the form and values of middle-class culture. They founded a different kind of life style of their own which appealed sex, drugs, jazz and material simplicity. As Yeşim Başarır