On the Road
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To say that Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road is autobiographical is a little like saying that Rembrandt did self-portraits once in a while. In a way that relatively few fictional treatments of one's current experience of life have managed, On the Road functions as a document of the psychological and cultural experience of one person and at the same time provides insight into a range of attitudes and behavior that explicate life for the generation that came of age in the United States after World War II and that prefigured the age of the generation gap that was to mark American experience in the Vietnam era. Into the bargain, Kerouac the artist, like his artifact On the Road, turned out to be implicated in actually determining the shape and content of the culture and its inhabitants on which they commented.To see how On the Road reveals, operationalizes, and comments on individual and cultural experience, it will be useful to look at the facts of its author's life as well as at the milieu of the 1950s America upon which he made such a mark. We begin with Jack Kerouac the man, or more exactly the emerging man, whose life from its beginning was marked by nothing so much as alienation, both physical and psychosocial. Although Kerouac was born in New England, the fact that his family was Catholic French Canadian meant that his first language was North American French, not English, and on that account alone he was culturally positioned as something of an outsider. Giamo cites "th
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Although he cautions against failing to give Kerouac's narrative techniques their proper due, Jones acknowledges that "readers are frequently attracted to Kerouac's writing by its willingness to reveal the intimate details of the author's consciousness, and this initial attraction subsequently locks these readers into biographical interpretations of the texts." In other words, the autobiography of the writer always seems to lurk not far beneath the narrative product. Further to that point, Johnson cites the "collapse of distinctions between [Kerouac's] media image and fiction," which nevertheless--or for that very reason--"marks the postmodern condition his literature intimated. Thus, his status as a cult hero expresses even as it obscures his focal position in the postmodern emergence, the way his literature registers the postmodern advent his iconic image embodies."
On the Road may be read in part as a picaresque exercise in documenting emergent postmodern America that is both voyage of wide-eyed personal discovery and a project of social critique. On the every first page the narrator says he had dreamed about "going West to see the country." . In other words, hitching across America becomes a project of perso
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Approximate Word count = 2611
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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