Summary:
Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road serves as a forceful and complex rejection of the white middle-class American dream. Based on Kerouac's journeys by car across the United States, the book voiced the Beat Generation counterculture's own journey away from mainstream society in search of both freedom and the true meaning of life in post-World War II America.
On the Road: Kerouac's Alternate American Dream.
Jack Kerouac was one of a group of young men who, immediately after the Second World War, protested against what they saw as the blandness, conformity and lack of cultural purpose of middle-class life in America. The priorities of people of their age, in the mainstream of society, were to get married, to move the suburbs, to have children and to accumulate wealth and possessions. Jack Kerouac and his friends consciously rejected this pursuit of stability and instead looked elsewhere for personal fulfillment. They were the Beats, the pioneers of a counterculture that came to be known as the Beat Generation. The Beats saw mainstream life as a prison. They wanted freedom, the freedom to pick up and go at a moments notice. This search for the.....
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