On the Road: Carefree? Utterly and completely carefree they are, blowing and twisting on the maelstrom of their whims, each lunging twinge of a mental process reflected in miles. A laughing blue sky waiting to swallow you alive above, a gleefully roaring engine burning hungrily in front, the road and its devils grinning wickedly below, Jack Kerouac's characters go flying off randomly along the twisted contours of their lives in his autobiographical epic On the Road. But what is the meaning of the book, with all its casual deviations- -what is Kerouac trying to say without saying? To answer this question, a reader must scour the book's passages for rhetorical appeals. For example, in Part I, Chapter 11, page 63, when Paradise/Kerouac abandons his screenplay in order to find a job, a "shadow of disappointment" crosses Remi Boncoeur's face; even though no words are spoken at this point, the look on poor Remi's face is quite enough to form a rhetorical appeal. The look conveys the sentiments of the central characters of the book that trivialities such as everyday jobs should be cast aside in favor of following one's dream (and clearly writing is one of Kerouac's driving passions). For one, this is an appeal from character; Remi, crestfallen that Sal has turned his back on his dream, is a person who has no qualms about stealing couches, or food, or stripping a ghost ship of its valuables. In this way, his desire to live the moment is connected with his questionable morals--a problem somewhat relieved when his general goodness is illustrated by having him try to organize an evening out in order to put his father at ease. When Remi wants something, he takes it, but he's a decent, big-hearted person overall--almost childlike, really. It should be observed that he has the amorality of a little kid. Therefore, this appeal from character should be seen as a cry for living one's dream-- an almost naive way of thinking of things, seen from the childlike eyes of Remi Boncoeur. Second, this passage contains an appeal to emotion. Remi's facial expression intends to prod that part of Sal, and the reader, that would like to continually live on and for the moment, chasing dreams, and never for a moment surrender to the mundane. This is the message that the book chiefly promotes: do what you want to do when you want to do it, and have the most fun possible. Time and again, the characters shift across the blazing heartland of America, yearning for release, for wonder. They live in the thrall of today and now. Of course, there are exceptions, moments where the restless lustings encounter resistance. In Part I, Chapter 13, page 96, at the time when he is living with Terry, there is a passage wherein Sal describes picking cotton, and he says "I thought I had found my life's work". He and Terry and her boy live together, and Sal temporarily forgets his friends and his wanderlust. Short-lived though this period might be, Sal becomes a "man of the earth" and returns to the "simple life". Eventually, though, he tells Terry that he has to leave and is on the road again. Two pages later he speaks of the American landscape and how "every bump, rise, and stretch in it mystified my longing". Apparently, the wanderlust has returned. Not long after, though, he settles down with his aunt for an extended period of time. He actually spends a year living the normal life, an odd exception to this Book of the Road. All it takes, however, is Dean roaring up in a beat-up Hudson to send him back in full force to the road. For most of the rest of the novel, he and his ever-shifting company of friends roam ceaselessly around the continent. In the first chapter of Part III, Sal moves to Denver, where he thinks of living the normal life--"I saw myself in Middle America, a patriarch. I was lonesome." This last sentence is the key, of course. Separated from his friends, most particularly Dean, Sal gives in to the stereotypical American mindset. But when he finds Dean again, and Camille kicks them both out, they embark on another series of excursions, the only binding elements being the road and the mislaid faith in reaching Italy. The pivotal time in the course of their relationship, this is when Dean and Sal make their friendship concrete. Of course, they never reach Italy, but they travel and party and live for the moment, and have seemingly little regret when it's over. They go their separate ways for a while, then reunite and, with the company of friends, head out again on the road, this time ending up in Mexico. Here arrives another critical point; Sal falls ill and Dean abandons him there, in Mexico. Sal, dejected, eventually recovers and returns home. It is here (Part V, page 305 and 309) that Kerouac describes the continent as "awful"--not once, but twice--an emotional appeal to the reader that fairly screams his loss and rage, and as this is the last adjective describing America in the novel, it is important in that it relates Sal's mindset at the end of his travels with Dean. It is not wonderment he feels anymore, but sadness. This too is a theme that can be traced throughout the book, entwining itself with the dual theme of freedom. It seems that everywhere Sal goes, he loses a friend or a lover, from Terry to Remi Boncoeur to Dean Moriarty. Apparently, Kerouac seems to be insinuating that freedom brings pain as well as joy, for when you do what you want to do when you want to do it, your bridges are in eternal danger of burning around you, leaving you severed, forsaken, and alone. The book finally ends at the parting of Sal and Dean in New York, the final repeated thought being "I think of Dean Moriarty". It would seem that living life for the moment exposed Sal to great ecstacy and torment, but it is the torment that rings the clearest in his prose, the bittersweet quality that echoes through even the happiest passages. "Love is a duel," rages Sal when he leaves Terry. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his love for the road, where the conflict between pleasure and sorrow escalates awkwardly until the very end, when Sal, weary and sad, watches his best friend disappear around the corner of Seventh Street.
Readers develop a compassionate emotion toward the characters, although the characters are detached and impersonal, due to the tone of The Road. The characters are unidentified, generalizing the experience and making it relatable – meaning similar instances can happen to anyone, not just the characters in the novel. McCarthy combined the brutality of the post-apocalyptic world with tender love between father and son through tone.
The story is an eye-opening look into the thoughts and feelings of an unnamed man who saw too much of his society and started asking questions. In the story, his quest begins when he hops on a motorcycle with his young son, Chris, a sharp but slightly confused boy. While Chris thinks that the trip is meant only to be a vacation on the back roads of America, his father knows that he is really taking this trip for himself. It is meant to be a period in which he can think about and piece together the events of his early life, a time in which he started to wonder about the faults of society, eventually driving himself insane. Their journey leads them through highways, roads, one lane country passes, and finally into beautiful pastures and mountains. It was during these extended rides and rest stops in nature that we see what this story is really about.
Cormac McCarthy’s novel, The Road, is set sometime in the future after a global disaster in which tells a story of a nameless boy and father who both travel along a highway that stretches to the East coast. This post-apocalyptic novel shows the exposes of terrifying events such as cannibalism, starvation, and not surviving portraying the powerful act of the man protecting his son from all the events in which depicts Cormac McCarthy’s powerful theme of one person sacrificing or doing anything humanly possible for the one they love which generates the power of love.
The story is set in the early 20th century, immediately following the Depression and World War II. The characters live in Monterey, California amid the jumble of the sardine fisheries, the "Palace Flophouses", Lee Chong's grocery, Dora's whorehouse, and Doc's Biological Lab. Throughout the book, Steinbeck has the uncanny ability to combine his characters' everyday problems with the twist of a utopian style of living. The end result is a novel with a strange mixture of fantasy and reality, which insists that good fellowship and warm-heartedness are all that are needed to create a paradise anywhere on earth, even in the run-down Cannery Row.
Life is a process that riddles with flaws from childhood to the complexities of adulthood. Salinger highlights that the perception of growing up is incessantly unbearable in a society that does not allot solidity and values to the youth. Holden fears of growing up and hates the real world because he is afraid of being alone and ostracize from society. At the very core of all human beings, there is a time that everyone have to accept what life holds for oneself and learn to move on without looking back.
The Europeans called them the Iroquois Confederacy, since they had successfully woven together sophisticated concepts of culture, spirituality, government, and land - something that they fataized for centuries. However, the Haudenosaunee way of life was changed forever through historical globalization as imperialistic endeavors by the French, British, and Dutch, slowly began to unravel the vast progression the confederacy made economically, politically and socially. Due to the economic impairment, loss of culture through assimilation, and displacement along with territorial loss, it has become evident that imperialism/colonization improved the lives of the Haudenosaunee to no
...s a good story. The journey is always what is written about, it is what makes the novel worth reading. Adventure is what everyone wants to read about, and for some, experience. Sal was driven by the pursuit of the American dream. He defined for himself what "the dream" was for him, and went out looking for it. He went back and forth across the country in search of his dream, falling in love (too many times) and taking in the sites of his country. Sal claimed that he wanted freedom and to break free from everyday life as an American. He was not correct in what he wanted. Yes, you can't tell someone that they are wrong for wanting something, but a correct name for a desire should be used. Freedom was already given to Sal, but he simply grew old of his surroundings and was not in search of freedom, as evidenced by following his friend Dean, the largest flaw to his plan.
While the woman is walking in the station a well-cleaned black man bumps into her, causing her purse to fall to the ground. The contence of her purse spills out onto the ground. She kneels on the floor to retrieve the contence of her purse. The well-cleaned man tries to help her retrieve her items, she speaks sharply at him. “You’re making me miss my train.” (Davidson 1989). She shoves the content back into her purse, and runs to the train. It is obvious she missed her train. Standing on the platform she looks nervous and unconfutable being in the station alone.
They wanted freedom, the freedom to pick up and go at a moment's notice. This search for the true meaning of life was given a literary voice in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, written in 1951 but not published until 1957. This essay will investigate some of the aspects of the novel that make it a forceful and complex rejection of the white middle class American dream. Beginning in the winter of 1947 Jack Kerouac undertook a series of journeys by car across the United States and finally into Mexico that he then wrote about in On the Road. The novel conveys a feeling of constant motion, a frenetic search for meaning in an America that is very different from the middle class ideal.
“The story employs a dramatic point of view that emphasizes the fragility of human relationships. It shows understanding and agreemen...
Everyone struggles with change and loneliness in one shape or form every day. While some of us only know how we handle these problems, it would help us more if we knew how others handled them. In Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, Holden Caulfield, a now ex-Pencey Prep student grapples with all of his many fears and problems. All while traveling around New York so not to go home and face his angry parents. Holden, who experienced the death of a close family member at a young age had problems with school; and was expelled from many. Now, as Holden is traveling through New York he is recalling past memories and struggling to find his way. Making some possible bad choices along the way, though in the end Holden realizes what he needs to do. Throughout the book many themes are present, through how Holden reacts. The themes of fear of change and loneliness are ever present in Catcher in the Rye, they both stop one from moving forward and they co-exist together.
The story is set in Florida in 1948. Salinger and his wife go to the state for a vacation. The story occurs three years after the World War II, and it is an important time in history. Salinger worked as a staff sergeant in the Army, and he served in the war from 1942 to 1946. He was awarded five battle stars for
After the 1620s, when the Five Nations first made sustained contact with Europeans, the role of warfare in Iroquois culture changed dramatically. By 1675, European diseases, firearms, and trade had produced dangerous new patterns of conflict that threatened to derange the traditional functions of the mourning-war.
The search for happiness and contentment is a driving force in the hearts and lives of many people. In the book, The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham, the author narrates this conquest in the lives of the main characters within the book. Elliot Templeton, Isabel Bradley, and Sophie MacDonald are each in search of that one thing that will bring them contentment and utter happiness. Through a series of tragic events in their lives, these individuals learn the harsh reality that putting one’s entire hope on solely one thing in order to find happiness, will only end in despair and dissatisfaction. On the contrary, the character, Larry Darrell is open to the different avenues, environments, and experiences that help in his search to the
The structure and language used is essential in depicting the effect that the need for survival has had upon both The Man and The Boy in The Road. The novel begins in media res, meaning in the middle of things. Because the plot isn’t typically panned out, the reader is left feeling similar to the characters: weary, wondering where the end is, and what is going to happen. McCarthy ensures the language is minimalistic throughout, illustrating the bleak nature of the post-apocalyptic setting and showing the detachment that the characters have from any sort of civilisation. Vivid imagery is important in The Road, to construct a portrait in the reader's mind that is filled with hopelessness, convincing us to accept that daily survival is the only practical option. He employs effective use of indirect discourse marker, so we feel as if we are in the man’s thought. The reader is provided with such intense descriptions of the bleak landscape to offer a feeling of truly seeing the need for survival both The Man and The Boy have. The reader feels no sense of closu...