1. The novel On the road in American Post-war Literature
Classe: III-IV-V Sc.
Prof.ssa Carmen Gresia

2. ON THE ROAD
Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940

3. The on-the-road theme The journey as a literary topos in Western literature
Europe
Odyssey (end of 8th century BC) and Aeneid (29-19 BC)
Beowulf (8th century?)
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387)
Dante’s Divine Comedy ( )
Polo’s Il Milione (The Travels of Marco Polo, around 1298)
De Cervantes’s Don Quixote ( )
Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873)
Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)
The USA
Travel books
The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884)
The road by Jack London (1907)
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939)
A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin (1951)
The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951)
Everything is Illuminated by J.S. Foer (2002)
The Road by C. McCarthy (2006)

4. JOURNEY as a means to discover the surrounding world and oneself
Existential experience for those who choose to travel in order to react against the restlessness and unsatisfaction deriving from daily routine and securities.
Travelling implies accepting the possibility of unpredictable encounters and situations so as to test oneself and to acquire a deeper knowledge of the world and of oneself
It is also a spiritual journey/adventure since, involving different experiences, usually imples a deep change in the traveller.

5. COAST TO COAST: ROUTE 66 THE MOTHER ROAD

6. Restless life and wanderings across America
Route 66
Road of the emigrations towards the Wild West
…. towards Eldorado, California, the beaches and the cinema of Hollywood
… towards the ‘pursuit of happiness’
JOURNEY = ESCAPE
Restless life and wanderings across America
through bus rides and hitchhiking escapades…
experiencing any kind of freedom and rejecting any kind of restrictions
Pursuing a natural, spontaneous and authentic way of life.

7. The 50s The Generation Gap starts
‘Fathers’
Representatives of the middle- class
Conformism and good- manners
Uniformity to mass society
‘Children’
The Rebel and the Drifter
Mood of irriverence and rebellion
quest for self-expression and liberation
Individualism

8. “Where are we going, man?” “I don’t know but we gotta go.”
On the road
novel by
Jack Kerouac ( )
“Where are we going, man?” “I don’t know but we gotta go.” 8

9. A contemporary edition of On the Road.
“Because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, (..) 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”
A contemporary edition of On the Road. 9

10. On the Road Structure Story of a friendship. Diary-like account
of Kerouac’s restless
wanderings across North
America (bus rides and
hitchhiking escapades)
It lacks a central plot
 episodic structure.
Theme of the journey  an escape from the town and from one’s own past. 10

11. Kerouac’s Journeys (Three years on the r0ad)

12. On the Road (1957)
‘The Guide’
Misfit wanderer from the West
doomed to save the
intellectuals of the East
Dean Moriarty (standing for Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady)
Neal spent much of his youth living on the streets or in reform schools and was arrested several times. VS
middle-class way of life
(fixed abode, a job, responsabilities)
‘The Rebel and the drifter’
Middle-class intellectuals of the East
Bored and in search of excitement
Sal Paradise (as Jack Kerouac)
Carlo Marx (as Allen Ginsberg)
Old Bull Lee (as William S. Burroughs)
they experience the precariousness and insecurity of life during the Cold War and they
DO NOT IDENTIFY
themselves with the middle-class way of life
Giovani intellettuali anagraficamente postadolescenziali ma non ancora ‘cresciuti’, tutti amici e maschi, che decidono volontariamente di vivere una vita da miserabili

13. Dean Moriarty, the co-protagonist
On the Road
Dean Moriarty, the co-protagonist
A fictionalised Neal Cassidy.
He lives for “kicks”  moments of intense experience and pleasure.
He is the symbol of the attempt to live every moment with intensity.
Neil Cassidy and Jack Kerouac 13

14. On the Road (1957) Dean (Neal Cassady) and Sal (Jack Kerouac)
are linked to the same restlessness.
keep on moving without a fixed goal.
Yet, at the end of the book Dean goes on wandering (becoming the image of the self- destructive hero) while Sal goes back to the East and to his daily routine.
Giovani intellettuali anagraficamente postadolescenziali ma non ancora ‘cresciuti’, tutti amici e maschi, che decidono volontariamente di vivere una vita da miserabili

15. On the Road Style and language Spontaneous and episodic
Natural explosion of feelings and thoughts
Stream-of-consciousness technique and page-long paragraphs
Unsophisticated language (the so-called “hip talk”)
Vital, authentic, alive and individual language
Opposite to conventional language
Break with the impersonality of the artist. 15

16. US Literary Background in the 50s
A new literary and cultural centre for the Avantguarde:
SAN FRANCISCO (West)
Fernanda Pivano:
“Città americana meno legata a tradizioni rigorosamente locali (…). Nella marea sempre più dilagante del conformismo di massa, questa metropoli andò delineandosi come un’oasi di individualismo, dove la libertà personale è ancora possibile grazie forse alle tracce mediterranee e messicane di un laissez- faire e dolce far niente che si cercherebbero invano in qualsiasi altra città degli Stati Uniti”.

17. Road Movies Easy Rider On the Road Thelma & Louise di
Luc Besson (1994)