Post One (Gioia Kelleher)

            On the Road takes place after the Great Depression and World War Two, but before the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. The Beat Generation, the movement for which Jack Kerouac represented, are stuck in a grey zone in American history. Allen Ginsberg, a voice among the Jack Kerouac, in a dark and somber poem “Howl”(1995) decries “Robot apartments! Invincible suburbs! Skeletal treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!” Here Ginsberg describes many of the harsh critiques that the youth shared during the 1950’s, a common feeling of restlessness and alienation. They felt estranged from their middle-class centered lives they had seen their parents lead. They had been told that if they were to follow their parent’s path they were to expect a life of fulfillment and wealth, but in adulthood they were met with neither. Strangely enough, their resentment stems from the prosperity felt by many Americans during the era surrounding the Beat Generation. They were promised by their parents ant their teachers that they would be happy if the followed the steps already created for them by previous generation, but the history they have witnesses would tell them other wise, so instead the tried to find their own path. The Beats represented the counterpart to the rise of the ordinary middle-class behavior, and though their quest for a new way of living life was honorable it in the end, as Kerouac describes in On the Road, did not lead to what they had expected.

It is widely considered that On the Road is partially autobiographical, though this seems inconsequential considering that every piece of art has to be at least somewhat autobiographical of the artist the created it, it is important when analyzing On the Road to understand the life of Jack Kerouac more so than would be required for other novels. In 1947, after the end of World War Two, Kerouac began his cross-country journeys, which would later inspire the novel On the Road. It was during these journeys that he met Neal Cassidy who Kerouac would base the character Dean Moriarty of off, the second protagonist in the novel. John Clellon Holmes, who is best known for his novel “Go”, considered the first Beat author and a friend of Jack Kerouac, is quoted for saying "Everywhere the Beat Generation seems occupied with the feverish production of answers—some of them frightening, some of them foolish—to a single question: how are we to live?". Jack Kerouac first labeled the Beat generation in an interview with Holmes and later quoted him an article in The New York Times Magazine "You know, this is really a beat generation." Though The Beats were unique to their era, the represent a communal conflict that every new generation must deal with. The restlessness of having to balance what previous generation tells you what is right and what you believe is right.