![]() ![]() ![]() That, in a sentence, is what On the Road is all about: the quest for ultimate fufilment before the sun goes down. Everyone is feeling the call of the wild, aching to hit the road and head out west. Sal, an Italian-American, is hanging out near Columbia University with a bunch of fellow “Beats” (a new term), restless and disaffected bohemians who include Carlo Marx (aka the poet Allen Ginsberg) and Dean Moriarty (aka the original Beat himself, Neal Cassady). The narrative opens in the depths of winter in New York City, 1947, with Salvatore Paradise “feeling that everything was dead”. Indeed, although acclaimed as a prophet of 1960s counterculture, Kerouac’s own idea of himself and his work was to reclaim the gritty individualism and frontier spirit of the pioneering days of the American past. On the Road is perhaps the supreme American romance, a contemporary version of Huck Finn’s longing to “light out for the territory”. ![]() Kerouac was an artist, but he was not immune to the charms of the American dream. On the Road pulsates to the rhythms of 1950s America: jazz, sex, drugs, and the desperate hunger of a new generation for experiences that are passionate, exuberant and alive to the heartbreaking potential of the present moment. To Kerouac, Whitman’s “I hear America singing” was almost an epigraph. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |