Jack Kerouac (1922- 1969)
Jack
Kerouac is one of the most important writers of the 20th century
and he is idolized by all the childrens of the world, thanks to his novel
“On the road”. With this novel he has upset United State at first and the
rest of the world later and also became the
leading chronicler of the beat generation. This was a current in American
life which emerged in the late 1940’s and exploded in the 1950’s and 1960’s
dominating American life and literature for two decades. The writers were
rebels against all the conservative values (conformism, materialism,
hypocrisy) of social institutions, business, politics and militarism.
Moreover the writers believed that their task was to explore new experience
and embody them in their works: this is what Kerouac has done.
Biography
Jack Kerouac was born in
Lowell, massachusetts and his family were French speaking immigrants; his
father was a failure in business and the family had financial difficulties.
He was sent to prep-school in New York and offered a scholarship to Columbia
University, where met Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady. Under the influence
of this two friend, Kerouac dropped out of university and devoted himself to
writing; he became a chronicler of the group’s activities, recording their
advenrures. In 1947 Kerouac went on a long journey all over United State, by
bus and hitching-hike: so begin his life “on the road” in search of new
sensations having interesting experiences. In 1951 he wrote on a roll of
paper of a teletype “On the road”, his masterpiece, which remained
unpublished for many years; the book was finally published in 1957, six
years after it was written. This success gave Kerouac a few years of
prosperity and security, but alcoholism and drug abuse had destroyed his
health. In 1969, tired and defeated by life, Kerouac died from a
haemmorrhage caused by drinking and drugtaking.
“On the road”
“On the road” is the
best-known prose work of the Beats. It is a novel based on the lives of
Kerouac and his friends. Kerouac speaks about the image of the roads
crossing the great American continent, the sense of America’s bigness as a
dimension of existence that needs to be explored and offers freedom.
The two central characters
are Dean Moriarty (a fictional portrait of Neal Cassady) and Sal Paradise
(Kerouac) who follows in his footsteps and chronicles his activities and
those of the group. He communicates a feeling of the openness and
friendliness of ordinary American men and women, their hospitality and
interest in other people. Every thing is observed with good humour and sense
of immediate involvement.
“On the road” has not a
plot, but there are three structural elements that give it coherence:
-
the theme of travel itself, the journeys
across America and the people met on the way
-
the group of people, the friends drifting
around America and meeting up in different cities
-
in the end there is Kerouac/Sal Paradise
himself, who provides us with a running commentary on people, places and
the thoughts inside his head.
The extract “First
Impression”
“First Impression” is the opening pages of the book; Sal Paradise recounts
his first meeting with Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassady) in New York and the
third of the central characters is Carlo Marx, the fictional “persona” of
Allen Ginsberg.
The Character Sal Paradise
seems to be speaking confidentially to the reader, recounting the past,
reflecting on it. The kind of language of the passage is colloquial American
English. The colloquial tone of the narrative also appears in the casual
refers to people and events which are all a part of Sal’s private world, but
about the reader is insufficiently informed. The narrator follows his own
order of memories, including a lot of heterogeneous details. This is evident
in the narrator’s habit of using names of people and places without giving
the reader any information about them.
We
also deduce that he and Sal are friends, but we know nothing about his age,
appearance, occupation, etc. (none of the kinds of tbings which a
novelist would traditionally tell us about a character when he appears for
the first time in a book. The effect of this kind of
narrative is to create tbe impression that the narrator is admitting tbe
reader to his private world of references and relationships, and it is
therefore a technique for suggesting sincerity. The narrator is telling the
story as if to an intimate friend, without reservations or artifice. Finally
the passage contains certain expressions and turns of speech which are
peculiar to the narrator himself and an expression of his personality.
These deeply individual characteristics of language constitute what is know
technically as an "idiolect".The distinctive kind of language used by an
individual and which differentiates his speech from that of other
individuals. In the case of Sal Paradise, we notice that his speecb is in
many ways highly distinctive. In addition to the use of slang and
colloquialisms which create an impression of informality, we find that at
certain points he uses expressions that are unusual in various ways. Firstly
there is a marked tendency towards exaggeration, coupled whith emotional
words that sound vaguely effeminate. Secondly there are various mannerisms
which seem artificial and literary, for example the habit of piling up
adjectives, similes and metaphors. The word "Iong bodied" also exemplifies
another literary mannerism evident in the prose, the tendency to write as a
single word what would normally be two separate words or a hyphenated
compound. These literary expressions tend to be used at points where the
narrative becomes more emotionally intense, and where the normal colloquial
register would be inadeguate to express tbe importance of a certain
observation. |