Jack Kerorouac Beat Generation Analysis

Alissa Nasett
English Composition II
Jack Kerouac and The Beatniks: Go On the Road with the Beat Generation.
The end of World War two started the conformity and a conservative mindset in the American people. The majority of young people's goals in life were to marry, move to suburbs, and be financially successful. The beat generation had a different idea, they were a young group of men who were against the "American dream" that the rest of society so strongly desired. These men were Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Neal Cassidy. They were a group of "struggling writers, students, hustlers, and drug addicts" (Foster 11) better known as the "beats”, and they were the founding fathers of the beat generation.
Jack Kerouac is usually considered the leading pioneer of the beats. Kerouac was born in
1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts. Lowell was a relatively small town, and "out of the raw outline of the legend he made out of his life in Lowell is simple and uncomplicated" (Charters 5). Kerouac fantasied of making his life a legend, and being more than ordinary like the town he grew up in. "He was always adapting roles, always an outsider, a spectator peering into the window like a shadow" (Charters 7). Life in Lowell didn’t provide the writing material for a legend, but life in New York would. It was in New York that Kerouac meet William S. Burroughs. He would become the biggest influence on Jack's life in the following years. Burroughs was a writer as well, but never considered himself one. He was interested in experimenting with criminal behavior, and often had contacts in the criminal "underground". However, his confidence and style impressed Kerouac, and had a huge influence on him. Soon after Kerouac meet another important influence. He encountered a "spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out" (Charters 57) His name was Allen Ginsberg. Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs friendship only became stronger as years passed. The three often spent time together, engaging in drug use, collaborating on literature, and drinking. They and their fellow beatniks would develop a huge interest in “lifestyle experimentation”. The five main pillars of this idea include religion, sexuality, drugs, questioning authority, and changing artistically and intellectually. Kerouac and his fellow struggling writers refereed to themselves as "romantic geniuses." Kerouac often explained to his parents who saw his lifestyle as a waste, that he was creating plot for his novel. To Kerouac, everything around him, his friends, his family, and his mind were subject matter for his novels. Personal relationships were Kerouac’s art. Ginsberg recalls that he felt that "Kerouac's books were the expression of the theme of "mortal souls wandering earth in time that is vanishing under our feet" (Charters 98).
In the following years, Kerouac would meet Neal Cassidy. Cassidy's devil may care behavior and alternative lifestyle intrigued Jack so much that Neal would become the center of Kerouac's most infamous novel On the Road. In real life Cassidy also became the most dominant influence in his life as well. Kerouac’s search for spiritual liberation would give birth to his novel On the Road. His writing exposed him, and his friends desire to find self-fulfillment, and portrayed their rejection of societies mold. On the Road became successful because it gave voice to the rising, disconnected young generation of the late forties and mid-fifties. It depicted the disinterest in "living a life that Harvard designs for you".

These young authors now represent the beat generation, and what it stood for.
Kerouac coined the term the "beat generation" in 1948 when John C. Holmes used it as a description of his social circle. "Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were new bohemian libertines who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity. Their literature was controversial in its advocacy of non-conformity and non-conforming style" (Foster 76). Allen Ginsberg’s poem "Howl" and William Burroughs' "Naked Lunch" are two important beat writings, and became a focus in American society because of the controversy they brought at the time.
The influences of the beat generation were not only writers, Neal Cassidy, Hal Chase, and Herbert Huncke also inspired it. They created it in a different way, by "providing subject material for writers” (Foster 82). Kerouac has said that Cassidy was his key influence in his spontaneous prose style/technique that he used in On the Road. The beat generation also has roots in Jazz, known as the soundtrack to the beat generation. "What the Beats understood and identified with in jazz, was protest against the white middle-class world" (Foster
102).
The beat generation was the first generation to cause a change in the culture of society, unlike the twenties it did not become a "lost generation." Their distaste for conformity is what made the beat generation the first "subculture." The 1960's counterculture was originated from the literature and lifestyles from the beat generation. 1960’s writers like Ken Kesey and Hunter S. Thompson were inspired by Jack Kerouac's methods for writing, his character, and what he stood for. Bob Dylan's lyrical stream of consciousness can also be compared to Kerouac's spontaneous prose method and his close friendship with Allen Ginsberg. The voices of the beat generation were the flame that lit the fire of social upheaval in the sixties, because the young generation influenced by the words of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs had learned the easier way out of the grasp of conventionality: Known as, the road.

Works Cited
Charters, Ann. Kerouac; a Biography. San Francisco: [Straight Arrow ], 1973. Print
Foster, Edward Halsey. Understanding the Beats. Columbia, S.C.: U of South Carolina, 1992. Print.