A Memorable Journey
Jack Kerouac's exhuberant novel, On the Road, follows a group of restless young friends criss-crossing America in second-hand cars while finding their 'kicks' in jazz, girls, drugs, and intense conversations about love, poetry, and serenity. Exposing the underground Beat lifestyle of the 1950's, Kerouac celebrates the defiance of a generation chasing the freedom promised by the American Dream while committing themselves to instinct and emotion.
Sal Paradise, a struggling writer living off veteran benefits and a generous aunt, narrates the novel with an awestruck wonder at his collected experiences of traveling the road. Frustrated and stagnate with his negative, bookish, and pretentious friends around campus, Sal yearns for new visions, richer experiences, and a release for the stirrings accumulating in his soul. The unpredictable, dizzying tornado of energy named Dean Moriarty embodies Sal's attitude of the spiritual potential that life contains and Sal "shambles after" him, hoping to reach that potential. Sal's hero is regarded as a long-lost brother and in Dean's "excited way of speaking I [Sal] heard again the voices of old companions and brothers under the bridge..." Born in Denver, Dean's mother died young and his father became a drunk hobo, leaving Dean in a childhood complete with reform school and harmless criminal offenses. Sal explains that Dean's criminality "was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the plains...." Dean's passionate disregard for social responsibility and the chaos he invites into his life, such as juggling two wives and stealing cars, results in a mad dash for the opposite s...
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...ecause it's the same in every corner.....We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side," one knows that Dean is sincerely trying to communicate from his heart and not painfully calculating his thoughts. Kerouac seems to write by letting one word spark an idea for the next word until the result reveals an exceptional sentence like, "the only people for me [Sal] are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "AWWW!" The sheer enthusiasm and intense emotions that Kerouac spontaneously invokes makes "On the Road" a memorable journey and novel.
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.
Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums does not fall too far from a basic description of his life. Kerouac spent the bulk of his writing career riding trains from city to city, meeting people and writing books and poetry. He was among the premier writers of the Beat Generation, a group of primarily urban poets and writers who put the basics of life and their spiritual nuances into poetry with a beat. The book, The Dharma Bums, is a window into the daily structure of the Beat Generation.
Sal admirers and enthuses about his sex life. In 1991, Eagleton published an essay with a Marxist sentiment declaring that, much like Nick, “Sal is suffering from ideology – a false consciousness that is imposed on them by the hegemonic social order”. This adds to the link between the two narrators concerning their feelings towards their leading characters; in particular the manner in which they both admire the achievements made by Gatsby or Dean in their love lives.
...work, at home. In the process of trying to be a good husband and dad, his only function is a money-making-machine, and he has neglected being a role model to his kids.
The first vote ended with eleven men voting guilty and one man not guilty. We soon learn that several of the men voted guilty since the boy had a rough background not because of the facts they were presented with. Although numerous jurors did make racist or prejudice comments, juror ten and juror three seemed to be especially judgmental of certain types of people. Juror three happened to be intolerant of young men and stereotyped them due to an incident that happened to his son. In addition, the third juror began to become somewhat emotional talking about his son, showing his past experience may cloud his judgment. Juror ten who considered all people from the slums “those people” was clearly prejudiced against people from a different social background. Also, Juror ten stated in the beginning of the play “You 're not going to tell us that we 're supposed to believe that kid, knowing what he is. Listen, I 've lived among 'em all my life. You can 't believe a word they say. I mean, they 're born liars.” Juror ten did not respect people from the slums and believed them to all act the same. As a result, Juror ten believed that listening to the facts of the case were pointless. For this reason, the tenth juror already knew how “those people” acted and knew for sure the boy was not innocent. Even juror four mentioned just how the slums are a “breeding ground
he doesn't he even own one. This where you can see how he is different
...ted by peer pressure. At the end of the play, after all the other jurors joined up with Juror 8, Juror 3 was the only one who still voted ‘guilty’. This time, Juror 3’s perseverance collapsed and he finally voted on ‘not guilty’. Juror 3 is obviously not as brave as Juror 8 as to stand up for his singular thought on the crime. A reason for this might be because he doesn’t have the intelligence to use good arguments to prove his stance.
Juror #3 is very biased against the 19-year-old boy that is being tried, and this affects all of his thoughts and actions regarding the case. He has this bias because his own son hit him in the jaw and ran away from home at the age of 15: “I’ve got a kid…when he was fifteen he hit me in the face…I haven’t seen him in three years. Rotten kid! I hate tough kids! You work your heart out [but it’s no use] (21).”According to this quote from the text, this juror condemns all teenagers and feels resentment towards them. He especially feels strongly about the boy being tried, because the boy grew up in the slums, and this juror is also biased against these people who grew up there. It is because of these feelings that he is strongly cemented in his vote of guilty.
Juror Eight stood up for what he believed in against eleven other jurors, and eventually influenced them all to reach the verdict of not-guilty. At the end of the case, when the jury is about to come to a final decision, Juror Eight says to Juror Three “It’s not your boy. He’s somebody else.
There could be public discussion about the balance between security and liberty to allow for a potentially better public understanding. A new and/or different program could be created with transparency in the initiatives and legalities.
During the 1930’s at the time of desperation and hardship people were affected by economic conditions that were beyond their control. These conditions brought about hunger, loss of homes, and lack of jobs. At the height of The Great Depression there were more than 250, 000 teenagers living on the road in America (Uys.,Lovell., 2005). Riding the Rails vividly shares the lives and the experiences of then youths who rode the rails or trains, as teenagers. Some left home to escape poverty or troubled families and others left because it seemed like it would be a great adventure. Teenagers who were new to the rails had high hopes of where their journeys would take them.
While reading the novel “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy the overall aspect is pessimistic. It is about violence, hardship, death, fear, and the loss of hope. Throughout the book, the two main characters, the man, and boy face up against some of the toughest survival and life lessons. Together they face the woman’s suicide, starvation, the idea of rape, sickness, survival of the apocalypse, and in a sense being hunted like prey by cannibals who also managed to survive the terrifying possibilities that cause Earth to go to chaos. Within the novel, there are hundreds of examples to provide evidence of the pessimistic nature of the novel. Cormac McCarthy who is the author continuously writes in his novel about some of the deepest and darkest situations
Harrison Scott Key, who was published in Best Travel Writing 2014, wrote about his travels on one of America’s infamous modes of transportation, the Greyhound Bus. In “Fifty Shades of Greyhound”, Key begins his memoir by recalling the first time he had ever ridden on a greyhound. He wanted to go see West Yellowstone, Montana and despite his friends questioning his sanity and his mother believing that he will die, he left. The narrator returned several days later, promising his mother he would never do anything like that again, eighteen years later he broke that promise. He begins his essay in a Greyhound station in Savannah.
288-293. ed. a. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Kerouac, Jack.
Jack Kerouac's On The Road is the most uniquely American novel of its time. While it has never fared well with academics, On The Road has come to symbolize for many an entire generation of disaffected young Americans. One can focus on numerous issues wh en addressing the novel, but the two primary reasons which make the book uniquely American are its frantic Romantic search for the great American hero (and ecstasy in general), and Kerouac's "Spontaneous Prose" method of writing.