The Beat Generation di Loredana Di Francesco

On the Road

In 1957, just when affluent, suburban America had reached its zenith, Kerouac saw his autobiographical novel published and obtained an enormous success. In fact, the book became a kind of "Bible" for young people,who rejected America’s values, consumerism, puritanism and individualism.
Back in 1951, in only twenty days, in an incredible burst of creative energy, Kerouac had typed On the Road on a 120-foot teletypewriter paper roll (see picture, page 5). He was inspired by the style of William Burroughs, but also by James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe , Theodore Dreiser , Anthony Trollope , and the French author Ferdinand Céline .
On the Road [F1] lacks a central plot, since its structure is episodic, but three structural elements give it cohesion:
1. the theme of the journey, symbol of the escape from the city and from one's own past;
2. the narrator Sal Paradise, who stands for the author himself;
3. the same group of friends experiencing chronic restlessness and uneasiness, expressed in a desire to "get going" and "keep moving".
The hero of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fictionalized Neal Cassady, who lives for "kicks", as he describes moments of intense pleasure and experience, free from all social restraints. Dean (as the "Archetypal American Man") symbolizes the desperate attempt of the post-war generation to overcome a sense of uselessness, void and fear, through a sort of escapism.
During their journey, on the streets of America, Dean and Sal Paradise feel wild and free, "leaving confusion and nonsense behind, and performing [their] one and noble function of the time, move": Kerouac describes the music they listen to, the people they meet and the details of their everyday life with an enthousiastic spontaneous prose. Following the rules he had devised for his own writing since the early years of his career, the author introduced slang and colloquial words, simplified punctuation and syntactical rules, and followed free mental associations: so, an absolute lack of interest in sophisticated language characterizes the novel.
The main characters of the book (and of most of his other novels, too) are clearly identifiable friends of the author's: under the pseudonym of Carlo Marx we easily recognize Allen Ginsberg, for example; Old Bull Lee is William Burroughs; Tom Saybrook is writer John Clellon Holmes; Neal Cassady's first wife Luanne is Marylou.





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