The Beat Generation In Jack Kerouac's On The Road

653 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: How has literature changed over time

Tara Pettner
Honors English 9
Mrs. Steppe
4/24/14

Jack Kerouac, author of On the Road, was one of the most prolific writers of the Beat Generation. Along with Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, Kerouac was a writer who broke away from traditional forms of literature and introduced a new style. This new style featured a musical structure that resembled jazz, and it pushed the boundaries of common literature. Throughout Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, one can see the new style used by authors of this post-war generation, even though he did not believe there was a Beat Generation. He left a large impact on modern literature by his breaking away from the usual writing styles. In addition, On the Road has been described as “a manifesto for the movement” (“Beat Generation”). The Beat Generation was a spark that began to change writing forever.

However, what was this spark? The Beat Generation is a term that describes a literature movement of the post-World War II era. It is a term that describes the counterweight to suburban conformity, especially during Eisenhower’s presidency. This was also the time when the Cold War was putting a tension on American life (“Beat Generation”). Jack Kerouac met William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg in New York City. The three became friends, and, because of their lifestyles, they were major influences of the Beat Generation (Weinreich). Kerouac himself penned a dictionary definition of his own. It distinguished the Beat writers as embracing “mystical detachment and relaxation of social and sexual tensions (“Beat Generation”).” Although Kerouac was such a prominent figure of the movement, he chose to believe that the entire Beat circle was disgusting. Kerouac participated in discussions about the Bea...

... middle of paper ...

...ons of writers before them (“Beat Generation”). Kerouac is also characterized by writing in a raw manner, rather than being what was considered “cool.” Kerouac was inspired to do so by Neal Cassady’s explicit letters to him. He urged Cassady to write his works as he would write those letters. Kerouac’s influence led to Cassady’s presence in the Beat Generation (Leland). In 1957, Howl and Other Poems was seized by customs officials and tried for obscenity. The charges were dropped. After the trial had ended, sales of Howl and Other Poems skyrocketed, and it brought great notoriety to the Beats (“Beat Generation”). The Beats were finally recognized at the time, and their new style was recognized by all.

Although the changes in language were throughout most Beat poetry, the Beats were not very similar. The writers are often generalized, but many find it difficult to

Show More
Related

  • Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums

    804 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Lunatics Taking Over the Asylum: Cultural Chaos in 1960s America

    7167 Words  | 15 Pages

    Firstly, the group of friends and writers most commonly known as the Beats evolved dramatically in focal points such as Greenwich Village and Columbia University, and subsequently spread their political and cultural views to a wider audience. The three Beat figureheads William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac each perceived an agenda within American society to clamp down on those who were in some way different from the accepted ‘norm’, and in response deliberately flirted with the un-American practices of Buddhism, drug use, homosexuality and the avant-garde. Ginsberg courted danger by lending a voice to the homosexual subculture that had been marginalised by repressive social traditions and cultural patterns within the United States.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Shumway's 'Blackboard Jungle'

    573 Words  | 2 Pages

    1. The sociocultural history of rock & roll during the 1950s created a metamorphosis of teenage mannerisms against the older generation. Shumway (118) emphasizes how the rock & roll periodization represses the nature of normal convention illustrated in “Blackboard Jungle”; through the deviant nature of boys against adults. The boys are malicious towards each other, sneering at one another just as Vince Everett did in “Jailhouse Rock”. While the post-war generation tried to discipline the baby boomers into their known demeanor, the recalcitrant teens rebelled against all means of adult intervention. Similarly Szatmary (50) expressed the generation gap between the baby-boomer and their parents fueled the fear of delinquency in their children. Shumway (125) refers to “Blackboard Jungle” to reiterate the essence of the song “Rock around the Clock” to define the conception of foreseen dangers of youth and the behaviors associated with rock & roll as a transformative cultural practice. In reference to the integration between African Americans and whites during the rock and roll era thr...

    Read More

  • Essay On The Beatnik Riot

    815 Words  | 2 Pages

    The Beatnik Riot of 1961 characterized the young Americans of the United States that were fighting for their rights. The young radicals rebelled against the milquetoast population of America during this time. The riot conveyed that the beats were not only fighting for their right to sing, but for equality of sex and race. The Beatnik Riot started a domino effect of protests across the United States.

    Read More

  • Jack Kerouac: The King Of The Beats And The Beat Generation

    605 Words  | 2 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • The 1960s Countercultural Sensation

    1079 Words  | 3 Pages

    The 1960s counterculture was a cultural sensation which first began to take shape in the United States and from there on it spread throughout the rest of the west. It spread sometime in the early sixties to early seventies. The counterculture sensation began to catch on quickly and it eventually went on to become groundbreaking. Several components contributed in making the counterculture of the 1960s a unique era from the other opposition movements of the previous eras. The post-war baby boom created an unexceptional amount of youngsters who were an integral part of making the counterculture movement. As the 1960s continued worldwide tensions began to develop in societies in which people followed the same strategies as their elders used to regarding the war in Vietnam, race relations, human sexuality, women's rights, traditional modes of authority, experimentation with psychoactive drugs, and differing interpretations of the American Dream. Several new cultural forms arose which included the Beatles and parallel to it was the growth of the hippie culture. This led to the fast development of the youth culture in which change and experimentation were mainly highlighted. Many songwriters, singers and musical groups from the US and around the world made a major impact on the counterculture movement which included the likes of the Beatles. Basically, the 1960s counterculture grew from a convergence of events and issues which served as the main substances for the remarkable speedy change during the decade.

    Read More

  • Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Light Books, 2001.

    947 Words  | 2 Pages

    Ginsberg was a literary revolutionary as can be seen in his poetry. He pushed form and genre, theory and confrontation, confession and controversy right to the threshold and over the doorway of societal standards. In pushing and pushing, Ginsberg creates a new vocabulary for certain words by capitalizing them and giving them the significance of the ‘proper noun.’ By capitalizing the first letter of certain words, Ginsberg gives a solid identity to intangible things and redefines their role in a corrupted society that has destroyed the “best minds” of his generation.

    Read More

  • Sexual Alienation In Allen Ginsberg's 'Howl'

    1233 Words  | 3 Pages

    The world was in 1950 at a point of multiple crossroads. After two World Wars an exemplary series of bad events followed, like the Cold War and the atomic menace. But it was also the beginning of some prosperity. People started again to gather material values. Nevertheless, the slow awakening from the fog of war was a process too complex to be generally accepted. In an apparently healing world there were still too many fears and too many left behind. On this ground of alienation, isolation and despair Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” emerged together with the Beat movement. John Tytell observed that the “Beat begins with a sense of natural displacement and disaffiliation, a distrust of efficient truth, and an awareness that things are often not what

    Read More

  • Lifestyles During the Beat Generation

    1040 Words  | 3 Pages

    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...

    Read More

  • Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose and the Post-War Avant-Garde

    3083 Words  | 7 Pages

    fiction, and jazz. But, fifty years on, Kerouac’s stylistic brilliance has still not been fully recognized. His reputation

    Read More

  • We're All on Drugs

    1197 Words  | 3 Pages

    While the Beats experimented with drugs, they were more mild in their departure from the mainstream culture than the counterculture of the hippies and acid-heads . Tom Wolfe observed that, ““Kerouac was the old star. Kesey was the wild new comet form the West heading Christ knows where”” (Lytle, 4). Even though Kerouac was a major part of the Beat movement and experimented with drugs, he was not cut out for the world of LSD. When considering On the Road, Sal Paradise, does in the end return home to his mother just as Kerouac did when Neal Cassady tried to get him to join Kesey. In Howl, Allen Ginsberg laments over the deprivation of his generation. He addresses one of the roots of the problem, “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!” (Part II, l.5). He blames the mechanization of the mind, prefer a more steeped in nature approach, drugs as bringing us closer to our own nature The ideas of the Beats echo in the ideas of the counter: a rejection of materialism, an embrace of experimentation with drugs, sexuality, and forms of expression, especially music. The change from the Beats to the Hippies was not so much a ra...

    Read More

  • The Beat Generation of America

    2265 Words  | 5 Pages

    "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...

    Read More

  • Bebop In Leland's Kafka Was The Rage

    767 Words  | 2 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • 1984 Analysis

    1136 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the 1950s, authors tended to follow common themes, these themes were summed up in an art called postmodernism. Postmodernism took place after the Cold War, themes changed drastically, and boundaries were broken down. Postmodern authors defined themselves by “avoiding traditional closure of themes or situations” (Postmodernism). Postmodernism tends to play with the mind, and give a new meaning to things, “Postmodern art often makes it a point of demonstrating in an obvious way the instability of meaning (Clayton)”. What makes postmodernism most unique is its unpredictable nature and “think o...

    Read More

  • The Beat Generation

    2378 Words  | 5 Pages

    The Beat Generation was an influence on the American society during the twentieth century on how they portrayed the way of the American dream through performing arts. It all began in the 1950’s where a bunch of writers got together to right about how much they resented the postwar society (Sterritt, 1). It was right after War World II had past and the postwar age was very unsettling for the beat writers. It was turning into a conservative lifestyle and the beats wanted a way of showing that there writings would make an impact of what and how they thought of society and postwar. They too, like many others were effected greatly by the war and wanted a way of rebelling towards all the pain they went through during the war. This began the introduction of the Beat Generation.

    Read More

More about The Beat Generation In Jack Kerouac's On The Road

Open Document