| Abstract | In 1957 Jack Kerouac, a 35 year old American novelist, published a novel called On the Road that signaled a beginning of a new movement in American literature, which was soon recognized as the Beat Generation. The Beat Generation was a group of American post-WWII writers who became prominent by freely writing about experimentation with drugs, sexuality, Eastern religion, conformity of the 1950s, uncensored self-expression, and individual freedom. The best examples of the Beat literature are Allen Ginsberg's Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957). Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac were in a pursuit of pleasure and they lived and behaved in an informal way, by celebrating non-conformity and spontaneous creativity. What made On the Road different from other Beat books was Kerouac’s self-expressive style, his overly repeated motives and symbols that he integrated in his book. These symbols, like the ongoing road, the travels, the city of Denver and New York, even the American Dream, which was completely rebelled against, represented Kerouac’s idea of living spontaneous with no goals in life except experiencing the adventures on the road and everything that came with it. |
