Analysis Of Jack Kerouac's On The Road

Analysis Of Jack Kerouac's On The Road

"We gotta go and never stop going till we get there."

"Where are we going, man?"

"I don't know but we gotta go." (238)

And: –

. "„What‟s your road, man?‟" Dean asks later, "„–holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It‟s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow‟" (Kerouac: 237).



These conversations between Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in On the Road shows that Kerouac has used the technique of spontaneous prose to mirror spontaneity in the characters. The characters do not have any direction, but they know that they have to continue on the road, very much like Kerouac and his methods of spontaneous prose. This is reaffirmed in the essay, "Formal experiments of the Beat Generation, focusing on Jack Kerouac's spontaneous prose", Gert Buelens writes,

"this moving without thinking about the place you want to end up, or considering how you want to get there, is like Kerouac's spontaneous writing, when he does not think about what precisely he wants to write in which order, he just writes without pausing to think"

The structure of the original scroll, along with the layout, and the long, sweeping sentences is another technique used to symbolise the attitudes of the character's in the novel. On the Road was published in 1957, when the country was in the cold war, and conformism was applauded, but the characters in the novel, they do not conform. They do not conform to what is expected of them in 1950's America i.e. jobs, families, and with the lack of line

... Get more on HelpWriting.net ...