Jack Kerouac's On The Road Essay

The Road, a post apocalyptic novel,written by Cormac McCarthy, tells the story of a father and son traveling along the cold, barren and ash ridden interstate highways of America. Pushing all their worldly possessions in a shopping cart, they struggle to survive. Faced with despair, suicide and cannibalism, the father and son show a deep loving and caring that keeps them going through unimaginable horrors. Through the setting of a post apocalyptic society, McCarthy demonstrates the psychological effects of isolation and the need to survive and how these effects affect the relationships of the last few people on Earth.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy tells the story of a father and his son trying to survive in a post- apocalyptic world. In the book, McCarthy sets up different themes and he constructs them through his choices in The Road. One theme McCarthy shows is that in a world of despair, we must choose to focus on the good things, we can focus on these good things only if we let ourselves do so.

O'Connor's position is that a way exists for man to escape the prison of the mundane physical world, but it is not of self-will and has nothing to do with material possessions. This position is in contrast to those of many O'Connor contemporaries; Jack Kerouac, for instance, made a career of celebrating the joys of the physical world, most notably in his novel On the Road, which portrays the automobile as a quick ticket to freedom. Other American novelists, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, decried the spiritual wasteland they saw the world as but offered little hope for escape from it.

     In Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, the narrator, Sal Paradise offers up to us what seems to be a very optimistic view on life. He is forever singing the praises of how wonderful his adventures will be and his high expectations for the future. To Sal, the novel is defined by youthful exuberance and unabashed optimism for the new experiences that he sets out to find. A deeper look into the novel, as well as a look at some of the critics who have written on it, reveals a much darker side, a more pessimistic and sad aspect that Sal simply fails to realize until the very close of the action. Whether Sal is hopped up on the optimism of jazz music, secure in his belief that he is off to find ‘IT,’ or just excited

“The Road” depicts a solemn and deteriorating environment that can no longer provide the fundamentals to a society due to the nuclear disaster. The sudden depletion of the resources within their environment made it difficult for the father and the son to find sustenance. They were constantly traveling towards the South looking for safe places to situate themselves because the father knew that they would not be able to survive the nuclear winter. The genre of the novel is post-apocalyptic science fiction because it revolves around a dismantling society. Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” depicts how environmental destruction finally gave sense for people to value the world and what it had to offer.

Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is his post-apocalyptic magnus opus which combines a riveting plot along with an unconventional prose style. Released in 2006, the novel has won awards such as the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award (Wilson). Oprah Winfrey also selected the book for her book club ("Cormac McCarthy”). The author, Cormac McCarthy, was born in 1933 in Rhode Island and is said to have wrote the novel because of his son and their relationship. The Road centers around a boy and his father while they try to survive after an unknown disaster occurs. While some people may argue that the unusual style takes away from the novel, it adds to the tone and meaning of the work.

Imagine yourself living in a barren, desolate, cold, dreary world, with a constant fear of the future. The Road, written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006, is a vivid and heartwarming novel that takes us through the journey of a father and a son as they travel South in a post-apocalyptic environment facing persistent challenges and struggles. McCarthy proves that love unleashes immense strength to overcome obstacles, even in times of desperation.

Jack Kerouac does an excellent job of commenting on the 1950’s American society through his novel ‘On The Road’. Kerouac bases his novel in a era in which American society is experiencing significant changes in values and lifestyle. The novel follows a group of friends while they explore what it means to live American life “on the road”. During their travels, they explore sexuality, define their morals, and learn how unattainable true happiness really is. Kerouac develops very complex characters as the story progresses. Through the characters’ feelings and actions, Kerouac is able to convey an atmosphere of universal loneliness. The author uses these characters to comment on the negative aspects of the decade and how they result in severe unhappiness

Idolatry and fantasies easily turn to disappointment when those people and experiences we have built up to be extraordinary are revealed to be the product of unrealistic expectations. On the Road by Jack Kerouac follows Sal Paradise as he and Dean Moriarty chase each other across the country and back again searching for something, an “it” that is always changing, always moving, and always hundreds if not thousands of miles away. An experiment in narcissism and the voice of the Beat generation in a transitory post-World War II period in America, Kerouac’s novel depicts a specific view of American culture from the white male perspective. Sal and Dean are not the only characters affected by their travels; everyone around them becomes often unhappy

Throughout On the Road, the influence of the Beat movement’s ideals on Kerouac’s writing is overtly apparent. As the narrator meanders up and down the country, both the main characters’, and the lone hitch hikers they pick up contain an attitude of restlessness which can be seen in their actions and speak. While hitching a ride from a farmer, as Sal and Dean prepare their story to tell the man, he stops them simply asking, “You boys going somewhere, or just going?” This so elegantly captures the internal state of the author coming out bluntly in the work. The beat idealism heavily places importance on personal discovery in any way possible, not necessarily knowing what that path looks like only knowing that you must travel to reach it. Kerouac was distraught with the complacency of living in one place, and set out with no real place to go, and as he writes in response to the farmer “we didn’t know the answer to the question, but it was a damn good question” (Kerouac).

The Beat Generation, one of the most significant social and cultural movements of the 1950s, inspired a lifestyle which rejected conformity and focused on individual freedom. It was America's most celebrated counter-culture and consisted of numerous writers of which Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady and William S. Burroughs are well known today. One of the key figures, Jack Kerouac, is famous for his work in On The Road which is about adventurous road trips, thus exploring America and the limits of one's freedom. People are provoked by the inequality between both genders by the sexual content in the novel. Thus, the literature of the Beat Generation was expressed predominantly through males and

The novel On the road, written by Jack Kerouac is an autobiographical book about a part of his life. The plot is about road tripping around the United States looking for some ideologies of enjoying youth generation in the late forties and the early fifties. The author is one of the most important writers of the “Beat Generation”, that is advocating the sexual liberation and the youth lifestyle in the sixties. The story sets in the United States of America and tell the story of the protagonist, Sal Paradise, who represents Jack Kerouac.

     Jack Kerouac is the first to explore the world of the wandering hoboes in his novel, On the Road. He created a world that shows the lives and motivations of this culture he himself named the 'Beats.' Kerouac saw the beats as people who rebel against everything accepted to gain freedom and expression. Although he has been highly criticized for his lack of writing skills, he made a novel that is both realistic and enjoyable to read. He has a complete disregard for developed of plot or characters, yet his descriptions are incredible. Kerouac?s novel On the Road defined the post World War II generation known as the 'beats.'

A time of prosperity, the 1950s revolutionized what it meant to live after World War II proved just how fragile life was. Americans started to go to college, began families younger, and found secure jobs - all in the hopes of discovering stability in a vulnerable world. For the youth, however, this chance at a prosperous life had come from the taking of lives. Out of this mindset arose an urge to resist the very same institutions that drove the youth to war in the first place. But this movement had hardly any mainstream recognition until writer Jack Kerouac released his novel, On the Road, which chronicles the road trip of friends as they try to find their identity outside a society driven by success and materialism. Writing the book, Kerouac

Jack Kerouac was an American writer and poet of French-Canadian descent who made a significant mark in history in writing during the post-World War II era. He was recognized as the leader of the Beat movement generation and most popular book, “On the Road” which was published in 1957. The Beat Generation was known as the movement that was started by a group of authors that researched and influenced American culture and politics at the time. It can be understood to say that the Beat Generation was the precursor for the Flower Children of the 1960’s. These group of authors of the Beat Generation included Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Sal Paradise and others. Majority of the work of the Beat Generation was recognized and published during the 1950s. Jack Kerouac’s first novel “Town and City” was published in 1950 was an autobiography of small town values and inspirations city life. Unfortunately, his first novel did not give him much recognition. Jack Kerouac also wrote The Dharma Bums, Visions of Cody, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Lonesome Traveler and several other novels. He originally wrote “On the Road” in 1951 on a single scroll manuscript paper stretching 120 feet long which publishers rejected for six years. “On the Road” took Jack Kerouac three weeks to write and was an immediate best seller once it got published in 1957. Jack Kerouac’s writing of the book