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.

In "On The Road" by Jack Kerouac, Salvadore Paradise's search for his meaning in life turns him into an outsider. He becomes so obsessed in finding "IT," that he loses his identity and becomes a shell of a man.

The actions we take are a greater representation of who we are as a person than the actions that others take against us. The examples in Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees and Jack Kerouac's On the Road show that what we do for ourselves determines our identity, not what others do to us.

Discusses the life of American beat generation writer Jack Kerouac. Analyzes his book, On the Road. Provides a plot summary.