The novel On the road in American Post-war Literature Classe: III-IV-V Sc. Prof.ssa Carmen Gresia

ON THE ROAD Edward Hopper, Gas, 1940

Europe Odyssey (end of 8 th century BC) and Aeneid (29-19 BC) Beowulf (8 th century?) Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1387) Dante’s Divine Comedy ( ) Polo’s Il Milione (The Travels of Marco Polo, around 1298) De Cervantes’s Don Quixote ( ) Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) The USA Travel books The Adventures of Huckelberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884) The road by Jack London (1907) The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939) A Walker in the City by Alfred Kazin (1951) The Catcher in the Rye by Salinger (1951) Everything is Illuminated by J.S. Foer (2002) The Road by C. McCarthy (2006)

Existential experience for those who choose to travel in order to react against the restlessness and unsatisfaction deriving from daily routine and securities. Travelling implies accepting the possibility of unpredictable encounters and situations so as to test oneself and to acquire a deeper knowledge of the world and of oneself It is also a spiritual journey/adventure since, involving different experiences, usually imples a deep change in the traveller.

Road of the emigrations towards the Wild West …. towards Eldorado, California, the beaches and the cinema of Hollywood … towards the ‘pursuit of happiness’ JOURNEY = ESCAPE Restless life and wanderings across America through bus rides and hitchhiking escapades… experiencing any kind of freedom and rejecting any kind of restrictions Pursuing a natural, spontaneous and authentic way of life.

‘Fathers’ Representatives of the middle- class Conformism and good- manners Uniformity to mass society ‘Children’ The Rebel and the Drifter Mood of irriverence and rebellion quest for self-expression and liberation Individualism

“Where are we going, man?” “I don’t know but we gotta go.” On the road novel by Jack Kerouac ( )

“Because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, (..) the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” On the Road (1957) A contemporary edition of On the Road.

Story of a friendship. Diary-like account of Kerouac’s restless wanderings across North America (bus rides and hitchhiking escapades) It lacks a central plot  episodic structure. Theme of the journey  an escape from the town and from one’s own past. On the Road Structure

‘The Guide’ Misfit wanderer from the West doomed to save the intellectuals of the East Dean Moriarty (standing for Kerouac’s friend Neal Cassady) Neal spent much of his youth living on the streets or in reform schools and was arrested several times. VS middle-class way of life (fixed abode, a job, responsabilities) ‘The Rebel and the drifter’ Middle-class intellectuals of the East Bored and in search of excitement Sal Paradise (as Jack Kerouac) Carlo Marx (as Allen Ginsberg) Old Bull Lee (as William S. Burroughs) they experience the precariousness and insecurity of life during the Cold War and they DO NOT IDENTIFY themselves with the middle-class way of life

 A fictionalised Neal Cassidy.  He lives for “kicks”  moments of intense experience and pleasure.  He is the symbol of the attempt to live every moment with intensity. On the Road Dean Moriarty, the co-protagonist Neil Cassidy and Jack Kerouac

Dean (Neal Cassady) and Sal (Jack Kerouac)  are linked to the same restlessness.  keep on moving without a fixed goal.  Yet, at the end of the book Dean goes on wandering (becoming the image of the self- destructive hero) while Sal goes back to the East and to his daily routine.

 Spontaneous and episodic  Natural explosion of feelings and thoughts  Stream-of-consciousness technique and page-long paragraphs  Unsophisticated language (the so-called “hip talk”)  Vital, authentic, alive and individual language  Opposite to conventional language  Break with the impersonality of the artist. On the Road Style and language

A new literary and cultural centre for the Avantguarde: SAN FRANCISCO (West) Fernanda Pivano: “Città americana meno legata a tradizioni rigorosamente locali (…). Nella marea sempre più dilagante del conformismo di massa, questa metropoli andò delineandosi come un’oasi di individualismo, dove la libertà personale è ancora possibile grazie forse alle tracce mediterranee e messicane di un laissez- faire e dolce far niente che si cercherebbero invano in qualsiasi altra città degli Stati Uniti”.

Easy Rider On the Road Thelma & Louise di Luc Besson (1994)