Outline (Meagan Adler)

          I.               Introduction

a.     The societal institutions of church, family and state are implemented to restrain the individual; the Beat Generation wanted to avoid these conformist values and shift society to the liberal left.

                                               i.     Generation rejects church, state, and family.  On the search to find themselves. 

                                             ii.     Dean and Sal are constantly on the road because they fear the permanency of settling down.  They are afraid they will be trapped by the institutions.

b.     These institutions fail the individual.  One cannot forever escape them.

                                               i.     Sal and Dean constantly end back home, under the roof of the societal institution of family because institutions are inescapable.

                                             ii.     Institutions restrict the “young, wild and free” mentality”

                                            iii.     Everyone ultimately fails as an individual because these institutions contradict each other.  By doing what people think they are supposed to do they are destined to failure.  “This is the story of America.  Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do” (pg.62)

c.     Institutions create a mundane homogeneous country. 

                                               i.     These mundaneness is a nightmare for the youth: “Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life” (pg. 97)

                                             ii.     Youth want to escape the institutions and be free. Why they want to be on the road

                                            iii.     Old Bull: “‘Bureaucracy!’ says Old Bull; he sits with Kafka on is lap, the lamp burns above him, he snuffs, thfump.  His old house creaks.  And the Montana log rolls by in the black river of the night.  ‘’Tain’t nothing but bureaucracy. And unions! Especially unions!’” (pg.138)

                                            iv.     “Isn’t it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life” (pg. 97)

d.     Thesis: As Sal and Dean aimlessly wander throughout the nation on their cyclical journey, Jack Kerouac underscores the Kafkaesque idea that the individual is destined to fail as he is inevitably forced to conform to the socially accepted member of the flock in a restrictive country where societal institutions are ultimately inescapable.

        II.     The Beat Generation

a.     Tries to escape societal institutions

b.     Sal is a follower and Dean is a leader of the Generation

c.      “They (Carlo and Dean) were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was slowly joining” (pg.48)

d.     Sal: “I didn’t want to interfere, I just wanted to follow” (pg.123)

                                               i.     reject conformity

                                             ii.     want to be individuals

e.     seen as a cult by society, looked down upon

      III.     Purpose of being on the road

a.     A way of staying on the move, a way to explore and find oneself

                                               i.     Fear permanency of settling down

                                             ii.     Beat Generation sees the road as their life. “But no matter, the road is life” (pg.200)

                                            iii.     “I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost.  I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon” (pg.14)

                                            iv.     “I turned to watch the kitchen light recede in the sea of night. Then I leaned ahead” (pg.217)

                                             v.     “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see tier specks dispersing?- it’s a too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-by.  But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies” (pg.146)

b.     The spontaneity of the road

                                               i.     “If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, think of all the places it journeys by as it goes out to sea forever- think of that wonderful Hudson Valley” (pg.9)

                                             ii.     All of Beat Generation wants to be on the road.  The craziness/rush the road gives them.

1.     “I thought of all my friends from one end of the country to the other and how they were really all in the same vast backyard doing something so frantic and rushing-about” (pg.11)

2.     “Everything was so crazy” (pg.39)

c.     The invincibility one feels on the road

                                               i.     “In no time at all we were back on the main highway and that night I saw the entire state of Nebraska unroll before my eyes.  A hundred and ten miles an hour straight through, an arrow road, sleeping towns, no traffic, and the Union Pacific streamliner falling behind us in the moonlight” (pg.218)

      IV.     Institution of State

a.     Sal and Dean are constantly stopped by the police.

                                               i.     State tries to constrain them

                                             ii.     Try to escape state by being on the road, but institution is inescapable

                                            iii.     Stopped on the way to Washington because they drive on the wrong side of the road

                                            iv.     Stopped and cop whips out his gun when he tells Dean to come out. (Dean and Marylou were having sex).  Needs to see Sal’s license.

                                             v.      “Oh they’re always interfering” (pg.155)- Dean

                                            vi.     Shows that society sees the Beat Generation (who are trying to be individuals) as a threat.  Try to restrain the socially defined cult.

b.     Sal and Dean are constantly looking for money on the road.

                                               i.      How do they try to rebel? By stealing.  Yet ultimately, their need for money becomes so important that they turn to family. (institutions support each other).  For example, they constantly turn to Sal’s aunt for money.

                                             ii.     Shows how the institutions gain their strength of limiting the individual because they support each other.

c.     State ultimately wins as they return back home and conform to society’s expectations.

        V.     Institution of Family

a.     Constantly return back home on their cyclical journey, under the familial roof

b.     Dean’s search for his dad

c.     “My aunt said I was wasting my time hanging around with Dean and his gang” (pg.120)

                                               i.     family looks down upon rebellious youth

                                             ii.     threat to disown children

                                            iii.     parents are the older generation

      VI.     Institution of Church  

a.     Institution of church implements itself within the Beat culture, for Sal sees Dean as his God

                                               i.     “Dean completely amazed me… He passed me like the wind.  As we ran I had a mad vision of Dean running through all of life just like that- his bony face outthrust to life, his arms pumping, his brown sweating…” (pg.143)

                                             ii.     “That’s what Dean was, the HOLY GOOF” (pg.183)

                                            iii.     “In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean’s figure, and he looked like God” (pg.272)

                                            iv.     “The holy-con man” (pg.202)

                                             v.     “As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, ‘Pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven’” (pg.171)

b.     Sal cannot be an individual, for he has conformed to the almost religious culture of the Beat Generation

                                               i.     Wants to follow, does not want to lead.

    VII.     Fringes of Society

a.     Whenever Sal sees the fringes of society he turns back home

b.     Shows that his journey to become an individual ultimately fails because society wins

c.     Society purposely allows the fringes to exist to pull people back

                                               i.     “I realized I was beginning to cross and recross towns in America as though I were a traveling salesman- raggedy travelings, bad stock, rotten beans in the bottom of my bag of tricks, nobody buying” (pg.234)

                                             ii.     “‘You mean we’ll end up old bums?’” “‘Why not man? Of course we will if we want to, and all that.  There’s no harm ending that way.  You spend your whole life of noninterference with the wished of others, including politicians and the rich, and nobody bothers you, and you cut along and make your own way’” “I agreed with him” (pg.239)

                                            iii.     “With frantic Dean I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it” (pg.194)

                                            iv.     “foolish gang” (pg.155)

                                             v.     “Dean took the wheel and carried us clear to the top of the world” (pg.156)

                                            vi.     “We wandered around, carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets.  Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanova-ish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops- a lemon lot, and how’s a man going to make a living with a gang like that?” (pg.159)

                                          vii.     Sal: “This can’t go on all the time- all this franticness and jumping around.  We’ve got to go someplace, find something” (pg.108)

                                         viii.     “The balloon won’t sustain you much longer.  And not only that, but it’s an abstract balloon.  You’ll all go flying to the West Coast and come staggering back in search of your stone” (pg.121)

  VIII.     Conclusion

a.      Although the Beat Generation fails to become complete individuals, it does shift society to the liberal left

b.     Whether it is through Dean and Sal’s constant need for money, Dean’s search for his father, or the religion of the Beat Generation, Kerouac shows us that society fails the individual.