The novel On the road in American Post-war Literature

Classe: III-IV-V Sc.

Prof.ssa Carmen Gresia

ON THE ROAD

Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940

The on-the-road themeThe journey as a literary topos

in Western literature

Europe

Odyssey (end of 8th century BC) and Aeneid (29-19 BC)

Beowulf (8th century?) Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

(1387) Dante’s Divine Comedy (1308-

1321) Polo’s Il Milione (The Travels of

Marco Polo, around 1298) De Cervantes’s Don Quixote

(1605-1615) Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) Verne’s Around the World in

Eighty Days (1873) Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)

The USA

Travel books The Adventures of Huckelberry

Finn by Mark Twain (1884) The road by Jack London

(1907) The Grapes of Wrath by John

Steinbeck (1939) A Walker in the City by Alfred

Kazin (1951) The Catcher in the Rye by

Salinger (1951) Everything is Illuminated by

J.S. Foer (2002) The Road by C. McCarthy

(2006)

JOURNEY as a means to discover the surrounding world and oneself

Existential experience for those who choose to travel in order to react against the restlessness and unsatisfaction deriving from daily routine and securities.

Travelling implies accepting the possibility of unpredictable encounters and situations so as to test oneself and to acquire a deeper knowledge of the world and of oneself

It is also a spiritual journey/adventure since, involving different experiences, usually imples a deep change in the traveller.

COAST TO COAST: ROUTE 66 THE MOTHER ROAD

Route 66 Road of the emigrations towards the Wild West

…. towards Eldorado, California, the beaches and the cinema of Hollywood

… towards the ‘pursuit of happiness’

JOURNEY = ESCAPE

Restless life and wanderings across America

through bus rides and hitchhiking escapades…

experiencing any kind of freedom and rejecting any kind of restrictions

Pursuing a natural, spontaneous and authentic way of life.

The 50s

The Generation Gap starts

‘Fathers’

Representatives of the middle-class

Conformism and good-manners

Uniformity to mass society

‘Children’

The Rebel and the Drifter

Mood of irriverence and rebellion

quest for self-expression and liberation

Individualism

“Where are we going, man?” “I don’t know but we gotta go.”

On the roadnovel by

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

“Because the only people for me are

the mad ones, the ones who are

mad to live, (..) the ones who never

yawn or say a commonplace thing,

but burn, burn, burn like fabulous

yellow roman candles exploding like

spiders across the stars”

On the Road (1957)

A contemporary edition of On the Road.

Story of a friendship.

Diary-like account

of Kerouac’s restless

wanderings across North

America (bus rides and

hitchhiking escapades)

It lacks a central plot

episodic structure.

Theme of the journey an escape from the town and from one’s own past.

On the RoadStructure

Kerouac’s Journeys(Three years on the r0ad)

On the Road (1957)‘The Guide’

Misfit wanderer from the West

doomed to save the intellectuals of the East

Dean Moriarty (standing for Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady)

Neal spent much of his youth living on the streets or in reform schools and was arrested several times.

VS

middle-class way of life (fixed abode, a job, responsabilities)

‘The Rebel and the drifter’

Middle-class intellectuals of the East

Bored and in search of excitement

Sal Paradise (as Jack Kerouac) Carlo Marx (as Allen Ginsberg) Old Bull Lee (as William S. Burroughs)

they experience the precariousness and insecurity of life during the Cold War and they

DO NOT IDENTIFY

themselves with the middle-class way of life

A fictionalised Neal Cassidy.

He lives for “kicks” moments of intense experience and pleasure.

He is the symbol of the attempt to live every moment with intensity.

On the RoadDean Moriarty, the co-protagonist

Neil Cassidy and Jack Kerouac

On the Road (1957)

Dean (Neal Cassady) and Sal (Jack Kerouac)

are linked to the same restlessness.

keep on moving without a fixed goal.

Yet, at the end of the book Dean goes on wandering (becoming the image of the self-destructive hero) while Sal goes back to the East and to his daily routine.

Spontaneous and episodic

Natural explosion of feelings and thoughts

Stream-of-consciousness technique and page-long paragraphs

Unsophisticated language (the so-called “hip talk”)

Vital, authentic, alive and individual language

Opposite to conventional language

Break with the impersonality of the artist.

On the Road Style and language

US Literary Background in the 50s

A new literary and cultural centre for the Avantguarde:

SAN FRANCISCO (West)

Fernanda Pivano:“Città americana meno legata a tradizioni rigorosamente locali (…). Nella marea sempre più dilagante del conformismo di massa, questa metropoli andò delineandosi come un’oasi di individualismo, dove la libertà personale è ancora possibile grazie forse alle tracce mediterranee e messicane di un laissez-faire e dolce far niente che si cercherebbero invano in qualsiasi altra città degli Stati Uniti”.

Road MoviesEasy Rider

On the Road

Thelma & Louise diLuc Besson (1994)