Lost Generation vs Beat Generation
A Comparison between Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac in Context of their Corresponding Literary Periods
Introduction
While reading Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road I have noticed that the author Ernest Hemingway is mentioned quite often in the book. This has raised my interest to focus my research on the following.
For the purpose of this paper I would like to take a closer look at Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, in context of the Beat Generation, in comparison to Ernest Hemingway, the leader of the Lost Generation. This paper tries to show the differences and the agreements between the two literary streams and how it influenced the two particular authors. Therefore, the paper starts with a definition of the Lost Generation and Hemingway in particular, and then I will try to deal with different aspects of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and its corresponding literary period. Finally, I would like to argue if the two authors are classical or rather if they are beyond classical norms.
The Lost Generation
The term was coined by Gertrude Stein, who was a Lost Generation writer herself, and she argues “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation” and applied that term to the writers of the 1920’s (Monk 1) It was a particular group of writers, like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald who spent some time in Europe between World War I and World War II and rejected the values of post-war America. Most of the young men had to march in and fight at the front, which is the reason why World War I left its mark among those writers. Many young men died in the war or were physically or mentally wounded. They felt lost and furthermore, all their basic values were gone after the war, because they have seen the consequences of what humanity is able to do. They lost their faith in the moral guide that had given them hope before, but that was no longer valid. They had to take the consequences; no goals in life and no perspectives
Introduction
While reading Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road I have noticed that the author Ernest Hemingway is mentioned quite often in the book. This has raised my interest to focus my research on the following.
For the purpose of this paper I would like to take a closer look at Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, in context of the Beat Generation, in comparison to Ernest Hemingway, the leader of the Lost Generation. This paper tries to show the differences and the agreements between the two literary streams and how it influenced the two particular authors. Therefore, the paper starts with a definition of the Lost Generation and Hemingway in particular, and then I will try to deal with different aspects of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road and its corresponding literary period. Finally, I would like to argue if the two authors are classical or rather if they are beyond classical norms.
The Lost Generation
The term was coined by Gertrude Stein, who was a Lost Generation writer herself, and she argues “All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation” and applied that term to the writers of the 1920’s (Monk 1) It was a particular group of writers, like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald who spent some time in Europe between World War I and World War II and rejected the values of post-war America. Most of the young men had to march in and fight at the front, which is the reason why World War I left its mark among those writers. Many young men died in the war or were physically or mentally wounded. They felt lost and furthermore, all their basic values were gone after the war, because they have seen the consequences of what humanity is able to do. They lost their faith in the moral guide that had given them hope before, but that was no longer valid. They had to take the consequences; no goals in life and no perspectives
Cited: Dardess, George. “The Delicate Dynamics of a Friendship: A Reconsideration of Kerouac’s On the Road.” American Literature 46.2 (1974): 200-6. JSTOR. 20 Sept. 2010 Dardess, George. “The Logic of Spontaneity: A Reconsideration of Kerouac 's Spontaneous Prose Method.” The Oral Impulse in Contemporary American Poetry 2.3 (1975): 729-46. JSTOR. 20 Sept. 2010 . Levin, Harry. “Observations of the Style of Ernest Hemingway.” The Kenyon Review 13.4 (1951): 581-609. JSTOR. 20 Sept. 2010 . Monk, Craig. Writing the Lost Generation. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 2008. Zerlauth, Martin. “Lost? Beat? X? - An existentialist reappraisal of Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta - The Sun Also Rises, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and Douglas Coupland’s Generation X - Tales for an Accelerated Culture.” Univ., Dipl.-Thesis. U of Innsbruck, 1999.