Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums
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.
Kerouac wrote The Dharma Bums while living the life of a bum, riding from city to city as a stowaway on various trains. He used an old portable typewriter that fed from a large roll of paper, into the typewriter, and back into a roll. This was a source of irritation to his publisher later on as Kerouac handed him a large roll of typed paper while announcing his new book. The book took only two weeks to write. It was one book of an unintentionally related series later referred to as the Dulouz Tales. Kerouac’s previous book, On the Road, defined the Beat Generation, and while expanding this explanation, The Dharma Bums focused more on the reasoning of the Beat Generation.
Focusing often on the Zen Buddhist beliefs of Ray, Kerouac’s character in The Dharma Bums, and Japhy, Ray’s best friend and spiritual mentor, the book often loses itself in pondering the meanings of life. Kerouac not only broaches the Zen Buddhist beliefs on the various issues, but also touches on how Christians, Taoists, and Muslims see the same issues. All this is affected in the dry, down to earth style of writing Kerouac became famous for.
Kerouac’s matter of fact style is evident throughout The Dharma Bums. When, during conversation, Kerou...
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The Dharma Bums, as a whole, supplies an inside examination of the life of a beat poet. It allows the reader to watch and almost experience the questions and conflicts faced by many young beatniks during the late 50’s and early 60’s. Travelling from the cities to the summits of the Sierra Mountains, The Dharma Bums not only answered those questions for some, but apparently sparked questions in many. Following the publishing of The Dharma Bums, one year after On The Road, something began called the "rucksack revolution" as hundreds of young people grabbed their backpacks and rucksacks and headed for the hills and trains and fields, searching out their own answers to their own questions. The Dharma Bums had broken through to many, and where On the Road placed the Beat Generation on the map, The Dharma Bums gave detailed directions on how to get there.
In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac strengthens his argument for the Zen ideal of poverty and freedom by this criticism of the conformity practiced by the middle-class:
Buddha has famously been attributed saying that “No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path.” In life others pave pathways that we must take that may seem suitable, and if we diverge we are seen as rebellious. The short story Sonny’s Blues by James Baldwin, is narrated by Sonny’s older brother who shares from his perspective the struggles in life he and his brother go through growing up in the projects of Harlem, New York. Using imagery that makes readers feel as though they are experiencing it as well, the author vividly portrays the difficulties of finding a path in life through the various factors that inhibit one such as family, friends, and the cultural standard ascribed to one. In the story,
Tallman, Warren. "Kerouac's Sound." Casebook on the Beat. Thomas Parkinson, ed. New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell Company, 1961. 220-221.
...beliefs with their own, or tracing the traditions to their purest roots and taking the religion from there. It was a long road, but the sincerity of the Dharma Bums and the other poets and writers of the 1960's left a legacy of religious freedom, breaking out of the barriers of middle-American Christianity and setting out for the new frontier. Kerouac muses over this in The Dharma Bums, "'Yes, Coughlin, it's a shining now-ness and we've done it, carried America like a shining blanket into that brighter nowhere Already'" (138).
One of the most famous of the generation was Jack Kerouac. Kerouac, a writer who was fascinated with jazz, drugs and philosophy embodied this counter culture lifestyle, even taking on the title, “king of the beats.” Wildly passionate for new experiences, Kerouac saw himself as a spy in someone else's body, an observer in/of the world recording through the keyhole of his eye living in such a way that he would eventually document and compose into his masterpiece. Kerouac opened the eyes...
Green, Cencilia. (1997). Historical Roots of Modern Caribbean Politics. Against the Current. Vol. 12, (4), 34-38.
During the “Beat Generation” there were three types of members: the wild boys, the hipsters, and the young politicians. They all have their different personalities and actions they use. The wild boys “drink to `come down’ or to `get high,’ not to illustrate anything.”(2) This shows a change in how they drank. They drank for themselves and to calm their feelings and feel better about them, not to show off to anyone. The wild boys’ characteristics make them `beat’ because are living life to the fullest, without any regret of tomorrow. They drink till they can’t drink no more or party till they can’t stand. This causes them to not worry about what will happen or how they are going to live tomorrow; they only care about the present. The hipsters they want to make “a mystique of bop, drugs and the night life, there is no desire to shatter the `square’ society in which he lives, only to elude it.”(3) The hipsters don’t care for society or care what it tells them to do. They go about their ways and do what they want. They don’t want to change the rules or the laws but only to make sure they don’t get swept up in ideas or thoughts that society gives them. The hipsters’ characteristics are `beat’ because they go against what is told to be the proper or correct way. They may get beat down in the beginning and face hard times, but later on they will find new ways of doing things and those will be the new way society sees things. The young politician looks up to “Badditt as a cultural hero.”(3) He goes along with what society has showed him to do. The characteristics of the politician make him beat because he doesn’t do anything for his own; he does what is right to do, and what will get him far in life. When society catches up to him he wil...
Richard N. Albert is one critic who explores and analyzes the world of “Sonny’s Blues”. His analysis, “The Jazz-Blues Motif in James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues”” is an example of how one can discover the plot, characterization and jazz motif that builds this theme of suffering. Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients that make up the plot: the initial situation, conflict, complications, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice. At the beginning of the story, the narrator reads in the newspaper about Sonny’s arrest for using and selling heroin.
Eble, Kenneth. ?A Forgotten Novel: Kate Chopin?s The Awakening.? Western Humanities Review No. 3 (1956):pp. 261-69. Online. Galenet. 4 April 2001. Available FTP: www.galenet.com/servlet/LitRC
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. A Norton Critical Edition: Kate Chopin: The Awakening. Ed. Margo Culley. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. 3-109.
Kerouac undoubtedly made his mark on the literary world with his prose. And his prose proves itself to be a very good example of his writing as spiritual commentary. Kerouac, while wandering the country in freight cars and the backs of pick-up trucks, saw himself as a modern day sage or bodhisatva, discovering the essence of “the void'; and using his literature as a record of these discoveries. His body of work is a wonderful example of integrating Buddhism into the daily life and thought of a man living in a western culture. Kerouac could not help but find religion in every aspect of his waking day. Every thing or person he encountered or interacted with was a part of the “essence of isness.';
In Kafka Was the Rage, Broyard described his life as a hipster. It was 1947, after the world war II. Brossard chose to live in Greenwich Village with Sherri Donatti, who was an abstract painter, rather than to live with his parents in Brooklyn. The Greenwich Village at that time presented the freedom and new ways of thinking, which was the world of artist and writers. There was peace and prosperity and a bright new world for the young. He insists that he is not the voice of the beat generation, however, his behavior can be regarded as the beat generation. He likes going to clubs and having sex with various girlfriends. “I say that sex used to be more individual, more personally marked, than it is now”(Broyard, p141). He thinks that the topic of sex is much different from the past and there is no shame to talk about the sex. Another hipster, Peggy Guggheim, has many common features with Broyard, since she admits that she has many sexual relation with many artists and writers. From my perspective, Broyard and Guggheim are beatnik since they both being free, believe the sexual liberation and being creative, which match the philosophy of beat generation which is conducting of oneself to reject white society, combining experimentation of using drugs and sexual liberation. Beat is the mindset of the beatnik subculture, which related each other. As Leland mentioned in the book, “The beats prescribed an ethos of lifestyle change”(Leland, p153). Beats generation changed a lot and even can easily tell from the clothing.They prefer to wear unusual or exotic dress. Social responsibility for them means nothing and they hate work and study. They disdain social order, against any stereotypes. Chasing freedom, using drugs and having sex is gradually becoming part of their life. Leland described them in this way, “The beats romanticized black life at the margins, imaging it as
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. 535-625. Print.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. Anthology of American Literature. Volume II: Realism to the Present. Ed. George McMichael. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. 697-771.
Chopin, Kate. The Awakening. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym et al. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1985.