Defining the Beats: Jack Kerouac's On the Road

The Beat Generation is the concept, which describes a literary and cultural movement that arose during the 1950s and continued during the 60s. The word Beat belongs to the jazz slang and people who prefer to live outside the mainstream values of America. The Beats were disillusioned and they believed in spontaneity. The masterpiece of the Beat Movement was Jack Kerouac's On the Road. The purpose of this study, is to show that On the Road is not only a novel which reflects the Beat lifestyle as in drug use, listening to jazz music and traveling aimlessly from one coast to another coast The travels actually reflect that the Beats go through a process of transformation. In order to show how this transformation occurs, I have used three different point of views. These are, Michel Butor's categorization of travel, Susan Roberson's concept of a mobile home and lastly, Julia Kristeva's point of view on the "foreigner." In conclusion, with the help of the perspectives that I have mentioned above, after analyzing On the Road, I have reached the conclusion that "travel" occurs in two ways. The first one is on the outside, physically done on the road, and the other one is the inward travel that a character does to the "self." In both types of travels, the character changes and returns home in a different state from how he had started out the journey. VI