Walk Two Moons and the American Road Novel Tradition
This essay examines Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons as a work in the tradition of the American road novel, drawing comparisons with Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Despite differences in audience and tone, both narratives use extended automobile travel across American highways as a vehicle for self-discovery and identity formation. The essay argues that thirteen-year-old protagonist Salamanca Tree Hiddle's cross-country journey to Idaho mirrors the Beatnik tradition of finding honesty and self-knowledge through movement and displacement. It further contends that the liminal space of travel enables a frankness in storytelling that fixed domestic life does not permit, and that Creech's fictional narrator ultimately proves the more honest voice of the two.
- The Open Road as an American Literary Tradition: Introduces Kerouac and Creech as road novelists
- Adolescent Identity and the Road Novel: Travel as self-discovery across ages
- Salamanca's Journey vs. Kerouac's Wandering: Contrasting destinations and travel companions
- America's Expansive Landscape as Narrative Ground: Geography enables extended American road narratives
- Honesty, Fiction, and the Liminal Space of Travel: How displacement enables narrative frankness
- Conclusion: Children's Literature and the Road Novel Tradition: Creech's narrator as the more honest storyteller
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay opens with vivid sensory imagery drawn directly from the road novel tradition, immediately grounding the comparison in shared literary atmosphere before the thesis is introduced.
- The writer anticipates and addresses potential objections — the age-gap between protagonists, the children's-versus-adult audience distinction — which strengthens the argument's credibility.
- The conclusion delivers a surprising inversion: the fictional child narrator is judged the more honest storyteller than Kerouac's ostensibly nonfiction narrator, giving the essay a satisfying, counterintuitive payoff.
Key academic technique demonstrated
This paper demonstrates comparative literary analysis across genre and audience boundaries. By juxtaposing a canonical adult text (Kerouac's On the Road) with a contemporary children's novel (Creech's Walk Two Moons), the writer shows how a shared structural and thematic framework — the road journey as identity quest — transcends the differences of era, register, and intended reader.
Structure breakdown
The essay moves from a scene-setting introduction through a series of thematic comparisons: shared genre conventions, the nature of adolescence, differences in destination and companionship, the role of American geography, and finally the question of narrative honesty. Each paragraph builds the parallel while acknowledging the books' differences, culminating in a thesis reversal that revalues the children's text above the canonical adult one.
The Open Road as an American Literary Tradition
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 1950s 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 free from the pressures of family and society, when one is traveling. Sharon Creech's Walk Two Moons could also, in its own fashion, be classified as a novel of the American road, very much in the tradition 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 at first. The fact that Sharon Creech is a contemporary children's book author may also make the parallels with Kerouac's road novel genre and the Beatnik experience seem anachronistic. Yet both novels take as their central theme the idea that through travel — and specifically the contained form of travel that takes place by car on American highways — much is revealed about individual character and the human emotional experience. Both are tales of the adolescent experience, although Creech's protagonist is a relatively young adolescent while Kerouac's narrator is a kind of grown one.
Adolescent Identity and the Road Novel
Quintessential to any understanding of an "on the road" novel is the idea that distance and travel make one more grounded and coherent as a person. The notion of adolescence as a time when one is better placed to understand oneself is not necessarily confined to a specific stage of development. Over the course of Walk Two Moons, thirteen-year-old Salamanca Tree Hiddle, from Bybanks, Kentucky, tells the reader a story about another young woman, the extravagantly named Phoebe Winterbottom. The fantastic nature of Salamanca's tale recalls the fantastic quality of Kerouac's own meandering narrative — much like a meandering road itself — and the blurring of fiction and fact that characterizes both works.
Salamanca's Journey vs. Kerouac's Wandering
Salamanca has a more specific destination than Kerouac, it must be granted. She is traveling across the country to Idaho rather than wherever the byways of the American road may take her, and she is traveling with her grandparents rather than with Kerouac's peculiar band of companions of varying emotional stability. However, within both narrative flights of fantasy, the narrator reveals honest snapshots of truth — about her mother and her own sense of identity — that are, in their own way, just as confused and searching as Kerouac's.
America's Expansive Landscape as Narrative Ground
Striving for identity through changing one's place is what makes both Kerouac's road novel and Creech's Walk Two Moons so quintessentially American in character. The expansive quality of American literary geography makes extensive, prolonged travel possible, so that an entire story can unfold in the form of an extended journey. Yet despite crossing such a wide distance across the open road, the sheer scale of America means that the struggling adolescent is still within the country and is still, therefore, in a kind of home. The road is vast, but it is a familiar vastness — and that paradox lies at the heart of the American road novel tradition.
Conclusion: Children's Literature and the Road Novel Tradition
Perhaps this is the only real and crucial difference between the two road books — one designed for children, the other for adults. The fictional children's protagonist ultimately emerges as the more honest teller of tales than Kerouac's ostensibly nonfiction account of his travails. In placing a young girl at the wheel of the American road narrative, Creech does not diminish the tradition; she renews it, demonstrating that the journey toward selfhood is neither the exclusive property of Beat-generation adults nor of literary realism, but belongs equally to the imagination of adolescence.
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