Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957)

 

Agenda for analysis:

 

 

Narration:                   1st person point of view (limited)

                                    Involved narrator

                                    Narrative irony?

                                    Reliability?

                                    Epiphanies?

 

Stylistics/Diction:        Repetitions/riffs/"mantras"

                                    Enumeration

                                    Compounds

                                    Unusual predicates

 

Thematics:                   'Blow'

                                    'Hip'

                                    'IT'

                                    'Dig'

                                    'Go'/'Gone'

                                    'Knowing time'

                                    'Beat'/'beaten'/Beatific

                                    Oysters/pearls

                                    Food/eating

                                    Falling apart/collapsing

 

Themes:                      Memory/experience/writing

                                    Talk/language/lingo

                                    Madness/insight/visions

                                    Music/God

                                    Questing/finding

                                    Sex & love/Male bonding

                                    Weltschmerz

                                    Identity/community

 

Genre:                         Autobiography, confession

                                    Novel

                                    Travelogue

                                    Manifesto/document

 

Contexts:                     Generationality/Bildungsroman/Bohemianism

                                    Intertextuality/Parody/Elegiac romance

                                    Cult status/imitation

Ideas for essays:

 

Jack Kerouac: On the Road (1957)

 

Describe Sal Paradise as a narrator. How is Sal's position in relation to the other characters? In relation to the reader?

 

What is the effect of Kerouac's narrative style?

[Words to characterize it: involved, enthusiastic, hip, a spontaneous bop prosody, circular motion around a jewel center, unusual compounds and predicates, f. ex.: "the raw road night", p. 16; "the dawn of Jazz America", p. 192] Find and analyse more unusual examples of micro-level stylistics.

 

Consider Kerouac's sense of beginning and flow.

 

Consider Dean Moriarty as a hero figure, as a prophet, as a saviour...

 

What role in the narrative is played by the landscape, by the vehicles, by the road, by motion itself?

 

Consider the themes of madness and youth and their linkage with (sub)cultural activity in the novel.