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¶ … Road
Jack Kerouac's "On the Road" was first published in 1957. It is a poignant story of a friendship between two young men Sal Paradise and Dean Moriary, who journey four adventures across America in the span of three years. Their journeys lead them through the process of maturity, found happiness, and personal disappointments. The central theme of the story is personal freedom and the challenges that are faced when seeking the promise of the great American dream. It is also the idealistic message of every generation of youth that discover the disillusionment of the corruption of the world. Upon its publication, Gilbert Millstein wrote that "On the Road" was "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principle avatar he is" (Pate 1997).
Sal's character acts...
As the novel begins, Sal is a starving young artist living in New Jersey with his aunt. Most of his friends are already out west, San Francisco and Denver, and Sal is itching to go. "Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me" (Kerouac 1972). In the winter of 1947, his friend Dean from Denver comes to New York. Dean if fresh out of jail and just married. Their journeys begin heading west by bus and hitchhiking. After Denver, Sal continues west alone, working as a fieldworker in California, among other things.
The following year, Dean again comes east to visit, and once again they head out west, this time by way of New Orleans and ending in San Francisco. Then the following winter, Sal goes to visit Dean and they are off again. Dean settles in…
Works Cited
Dempsey, David. "In Pursuit of 'Kicks'." New York Times. September 8, 1957.
On the Road Scroll: Sold to the Highest Bidder. http://members.aol.com/kerouacsis/kerouacscroll.html.(accessed07-27-2002).
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. Penguin USA. June 1972.
Millstein, Gilbert. "Book of the Times." New York Times. September 5, 1957. On the Road Scroll: Sold to the Highest Bidder. http://members.aol.com/kerouacsis/kerouacscroll.html.(accessed07-27-2002).
1997. http://www.lubbockonline.com/news/091197/jack.htm.(accessed07-27- 2002).
Road is one of the best Beat novels written by Jack Kerouac. It is a captivating, moral and touching tale that has given a detailed account of a friendship and the four trips across America. The writer has used his full creativity and talents in producing this piece of work. The presentation is so effective that the readers starts to have a feeling that if he/she is in that place.
Obviously, Sal Paradise, much like Kerouac himself, loves American jazz music, especially played on the acoustic guitar by an African-American jazz/blues giant like Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. As Mark Richardson sees it, writing in "Peasant Dreams: Reading On The Road," "The strain of the basic primitive," in this case jazz, ". . . is what Sal and Dean listen to in order to hear" what they call "wailing
Road Some books are deceptive in terms of their subject matter. At first glance, for example, such books can appear simple, with a relatively straightforward story. Others are excessively uplifting or bleak, appearing to cater to only one single concept or emotion. Many times, however, the most apparently simple stories can hide deeper themes relating to the what we as human beings truly are. They contain important lessons or hold the
" (Cresswell, p. 249) In a manner, this also points us toward a more direct consideration of the friendship around which this novel revolves. In the relationship between Sal and Dean, we are given not just an autobiographical window into the lives of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy respectively, but also into the core values to which the counterculture movement was essentially committed. Again, this denotes the inherently relatable nature of
beat generation are several strong principles, the most notable is associated with the founder, Jack Kerouac and his definition of the generation as a whole. The road" has been a powerful metaphor for freedom from the constraints of ordinary life, ever since Jack Kerouac's On the Road became the Beatnik Bible in the 1950's. Kerouac saw beauty in gas stations and freedom on the road. The metaphor caught the imagination
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