Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Kerouac’s On the Road – The River and the Road

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Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Kerouac’s On the Road – The River and the Road

One element that separates a good novel from a great novel is its enduring effects on society. A great novel transcends time; it changes and mirrors the consciousness of a civilization. One such novel is Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For the past one hundred and fifteen years, it has remained in print and has been one of the most widely studied texts in high schools and colleges. According to Lionel Trilling, its success is due to Twain’s “voice of unpretentious truth” (92) embodied in the young narrator Huck Finn who reveals the hypocrisy and moral deprivation of society through his innocent observations. It is a picaresque novel, or novel of the road, where the river acts as the road that carries the characters on continuous adventures.

Seventy years after the publication of Huckleberry Finn, Jack Kerouac began to write his picaresque novel entitled On the Road. Like Twain’s Huck Finn, Sal Paradise is Kerouac’s naïve narrator who captures the essence of life in his depictions of experiences on the road. Both characters are social commentators regarding the conditions of their surroundings; they are public barometers who measure the state of societal values. Even though Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is heralded as one of the greatest American novels, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road embraces a loftier, more mature, religious ideal of life that transcends Twain’s social commentary and will one day place it permanently in the anthologies of American literature.

The similarities between Huckleberry Finn and On the Road are numerous and worth

consideration because they depict the hand in hand progression (one following the other in ...

... middle of paper ...

...76.

Hunt, Tim. Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of Fiction. Hamden: Archon Books, 1981.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York Penguin, 1957.

---------, Jack. Selected Letters: Jack Kerouac 1957-1969. Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Viking P, 1999.

Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley: U of California P, 1983.

Swartz, Omar. The View from On the Road. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP: 1999.

Trilling, Lionel. “A Certain Formal Aptness.” Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Eds. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford, 1995. 284-85.

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Eds. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston: Bedford, 1995.

Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac. New York: Paragon House, 1990.

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