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¶ … American Novel
On the Road with Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons
The romance of the open road. The dusty highway. The screech of brakes and the roar of the gas pedal. All of these images come straight from Jack Kerouac's seminal novel On the Road, a tale of the American 1950's Beatnik experience, a tale of America viewed through travel and the window of a car. According to Kerouac, one is most American and yet most away from the pressures of one's family and American society when one is traveling. Yet Sharon Creech's book Walk Two Moons could also, in its own fashion, also be classified as a novel of the American road, very much along the lines of the Beatnik Kerouac.
Given that Jack Kerouac was telling a tale of deviancy and dropouts, rather than of familial connection and harmony, this thesis may sound strange to the ears, at first. Also, the fact that Sharon Creech is a contemporary children's book author may make the parallels with Kerouac's...
But both novels take as their themes that through travel, and specifically the contained form of travel that takes place by car on American highways, much is revealed about one's individual character and the human, emotional and individual experience. Both are tales of the adolescent experience, although Creech's protagonist is a relatively young adolescent, and Kerouac's narrator is a kind of grown adolescent.
Regardless of age, quintessential to the understanding of a 'on the road' novel is that distance and travel makes one more grounded and coherent as a human self and human person. The notion of adolescence as a time where one is better trying to understand one's self is not necessarily confined to a specific age of development. Over the course of the novel Walk two Moons, a young girl, thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle, from Bybanks, Kentucky tells the reader a story of another young woman, the…
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