On the Road – a riveting journey through a book The novel On the Road, written by the American author Jack Kerouac and based on his own travels, follows Salvatore Paradise on a road trip across The United States and Mexico, accompanied by his maniac of a friend Dean Moriarty. This exuberant and dazzling “roman à clef”, published in 1957, takes place from 1947 to 1950 and describes the friend’s journey against a backdrop of drugs, alcohol, Jazz and spirituality in a post-war America. Written in a vivid and spontaneous manner, this novel creates a gripping portrait of the Beat generation, making this one of the most captivating and poignant novels I have read. I found the novel On the Road to be a gripping novel with an engrossing plot. With a new setting in each chapter and new …show more content…
The novel was written in a unique way Kerouac called “Spontaneous Prose” a sort of stream-of-conciseness writing (writing.upenn.edu). Such writing results in a beautiful and vivid, descriptive language filled with sentences mimicking the friend’s old 1947 Cadillac Limousine. They brim with fierce energy as the words speed through the pages in an exhilarating pace, often taking up a whole page without a period, reaching a long-awaited climax, before coming to an exhausting stop. Kerouac’s writing captivates the reader and constantly keeps you on edge. The more relaxed depiction of the environment and setting of the novel breaks up the sometimes intense writing style and quirky characters. The plot of the novel takes place in several states stretching from New York to San Francisco and takes an end in Mexico. This is where Kerouac’s language and writing particularly impressed me. He manages to write marvelous descriptions of the atmosphere and surroundings of these places that I often felt as if I was a sitting in the old jalopy alongside Sal Paradise looking over 50’s
Tallman, Warren. "Kerouac's Sound." Casebook on the Beat. Thomas Parkinson, ed. New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1961. 220-221.
...of such a process. At the same time, this process is not simply a sentimental return to the folk, or a new primitivism on the part of the intellectual, but also involves the intellectual-poet's giving a new consciousness to the folk that allows it to see its power and destiny more clearly while recognizing its weaknesses” (Southern Road). Southern Road is about a black man working on a chain gang. The man is a prisoner. His daughter is a hooker on the streets, his son already dead, and his wife pregnant.
The Road, a post-apocalyptic, survival skills fiction book written by Cormac McCarthy and published in 2006 is part of the Oprah Winfrey book club. During an interview with Oprah, McCarthy answered questions about The Road that he had never been asked before because pervious to the interview he had never been interviewed. Oprah asked what inspired the heart breaking book; it turns out that McCarthy wrote the book after taking a vacation with his son John. While on the vacation he imagined the world fifty years later and seen fire in the distant hills. After the book was finished, McCarthy dedicated it to his son, John. Throughout the book McCarthy included things that he knows he and his son would do and conversations that he thinks they may have had. (Cormac). Some question if the book is worth reading for college course writing classes because of the amount of common writing “rule breaks”. After reading and doing assignments to go along with The Road, I strongly believe that the novel should be required for more college courses such as Writing and Rhetoric II. McCarthy wrote the book in a way to force readers to get out of their comfort zones; the book has a great storyline; so doing the assignments are fairly easy, and embedded in the book are several brilliant survival tactics.
The poem “Southern Road” by Sterling Brown is about a man in prison contemplating his life. On either side of the jail fences, his life is depressing, and the blues tone sets the mood. Two prominent characteristics of the poem is the low language dialect and onomatopoeia. Brown uses these literary devices to paint a picture. He does not mention that the protagonist is black or that he is from the south, but from his dialect, the readers are able to tell his ethnicity. The literary devices used in the poem reveals the story of the protagonist and captivates the hardships of African American.
In Cormac McCarthy’s Sci-Fi novel, “The Road”, two mysterious people, a father and his curious son, contact survival of the fittest during tragic apocalyptic times. With a shopping cart of food and supplies, they excavate into the remains of tattered houses, torn buildings and other sheltering places, while averting from troublesome communes. In the duration of the novel, they’re plagued with sickness that temporarily unable them to proceed onward. Due to the inopportune events occurring before the apocalypse, the wife of the son and father committed suicide due to these anonymous survivors lurking the remains of earth. The last people on earth could be the ‘bad guys’ as the young boy describes them. In page 47, the wife reacted to this, stating, “Sooner or later they will catch us and they will kill us. They will rape me. They'll rape him. They are going to rape us and kill us and eat us and you won't face it. You'd rather wait for it to happen. But I can't.”
Kerouac guides the reader to the understanding that "IT" can be different for everyone. Sal began his search for "IT" because he was restless in ...
On The Road begins with the protagonist, Sal, (representative of author Jack Kerouac), being overwhelmed by feelings of confusion and uncertainty regarding his personal identity. He then meets ‘Dean Moriarty’, an eccentric character who rejects societal values and ‘norms’. Sal is absorbed with and entranced by Dean, perceiving him as almost ‘superhuman’, and decides to follow him across the country. A passive character, Sal soon becomes dependent on Dean, mimicking his friend rather than discovering his personal identity. It is likely that such behaviour was greatly influenced by events that occurred in Jack Kerouac’s childhood . Eventually, Sal realises that if he is to be independent, he must no longer blindly follow others, but discover himself.
Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” is a powerful song in that it layers seemingly simple lyrics with more ambiguous, complex undertones. Indeed, seen in this light, the track is a direct criticism of the state of the high-pressure music industry in the 1970s. I will be analyzing Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” in relation to musical and cultural context of the time period in which it was first released. In my paper, I will explore the unique appeal of “Cocaine” to both rock aficionados and casual listeners, and the manner in which it establishes Clapton as one of the great pioneers and influencers of the blues rock genre.
Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, written by Paul Schrader, both tell the same story about a man who is lonely and blames the world around him for his loneliness. The characters of Underground Man and Travis Bickle mirror each other; they both live in the underground, narrating their respective stories, experiencing aches and maladies which they leave unchecked, seeing the city they live in as a modern-day hell filled with the fake and corrupt. However, time and again both Travis and the Underground Man contradict themselves. While the underground character preaches his contempt for civilization—the ‘aboveground’—and the people within it, he constantly displays a deep-seeded longing to be a part of it. Both characters believe in a strong ideal that challenges that of the city’s, an ideal that is personified by the character of the prostitute.
"Burn, burn, burn," says Kerouac, and that is what the Beats were all about. From the all-night, smoke-filled jazz clubs of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, to the trendy bars of San Francisco, the artists known as the ‘Beats’ were interested in one thing, and only one thing: living. To them, life was a series of adventures to be lived. Going from one high to the next, in search of that thing that will, in the end, transform them into that "blue centerlight" about which everyone says "Awww!" But a few questions must be addressed regarding the Beats. Was theirs the correct choice? Was the fun they had worth the pain that they caused, and the pain that they had to endure? And ultimately, what impact did the Beats have on society as a whole, and was that impact, is that impact, positive or negative? Jack Kerouac, the most prominent of all Beat poets, and the gang hanging out at the famous 115th Street apartment helped to mold two generations of young Americans, and have made a permanent impression on the landscape of American culture through their literature, and most of all, through their lives, and their desire to live. This is the contribution of the Beats: a legacy of s...
288-293. ed. a. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Kerouac, Jack.
When first reading “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin, it may initially seem that the relationship between musicians and drugs is synonymous. Public opinion suggests that musicians and drugs go hand and hand. The possibility lies that Sonny’s passion for jazz music is the underlying reason for his drug use, or even the world of jazz music itself brought drugs into Sonny’s life. The last statement is what the narrator believes to be true. However, by delving deeper and examining the theme of music in the story, it is nothing but beneficial for Sonny and the other figures involved. Sonny’s drug use and his music are completely free of one another. Sonny views his jazz playing as a ray of light to lead him away from the dim and dismal future that Harlem has to offer.
In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, in the post-apocalyptic world that the man and the boy live in, dreams begin to take on the form of a new “reality.” As the novel progresses, the man’s dreams, initially memories remnant of his pre-apocalypse life, become “brighter” as the boy’s dreams become darker and nightmarish. Through the use of color and distinct language, McCarthy emphasizes the contrast between reality and dreams. The man’s reliance on bad dreams to keep him tied to the harsh reality alludes to the hopelessness of the situation; he can never truly escape. McCarthy suggests that those who strive for a life that no longer exists are deluded with false hope. Having dreams is a natural human tendency, but in a world that has become so inhumane, the man can’t even afford to retain this element of being human. The loss of the past is a concept that the characters living in this ashen world struggle with, and McCarthy presents memory as a weakness to be exploited.
People always like to refer to themselves as “independent”. Independence may seem like a great ideal in modern society, but in a post-apocalyptic world, a sense of dependence is unavoidable. Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs help us to understand what people depend on. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, survival of the boy and the man is due to their dependence on their human nature and ability to support one another.
One theme that is prevalent throughout much of the literature we have covered so far is that it is very critical of the conformist values of late 1950s society. In an era of Levittowns and supermarkets and the omnipresent television, there was a call to leave the conformist suburban culture in search of something higher. Two major proponents of the individual as opposed to society were Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, two of the central figures in the Beat movement. Through their work one can gain a perspective on the anti-conformity spirit that was brewing under the surface in the Beat culture.