[ VOLUME 2 I ISSUE 4 I OCT. – DEC. 2015] E ISSN 2348 –1269, PRINT ISSN 2349-5138 IJRAR Impact Factor 3.215 From Movement to Meaning: Exploring the Existential in Jack Kerouac’ Works

Dr Rakhi Vyas Assistant Professor, Department of English, Jai Narain Vyas University, Jodhpur

Received Nov. 14, 2015 Accepted Dec. 15, 2015

“…The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem. …” (Kerouac 144) One of the most significant and memorable exasperation, innocence, zest and spiritual landmarks of the post-war American cultural yearnings. They are a powerful fictional and literary history was the emergence of a signature of a generation baffled by the bohemian cluster of writers blanketed under contemporary American society’s negation of the canopy of Beat writers that formed the human values which were most evidently Beat culture or the Beat movement in evinced in the American assault on Vietnam, America. Soon to become one of the most oppression of gays and lesbians, prejudices important sources of the contemporary against racial minorities and such other American counterculture, the Beats or the oppressive paradigms of the establishment. Beat movement brought the much needed The novels are an intriguing reflection of the breakthrough for the American soul that was zeitgeist of that time as it “….was a war with hitherto feeding itself on post-war patriotic social overtones..” (Kerouac 35) fervor and new wave of capitalism. The Beat Among his most celebrated fictional works writers/poets, fatigued with the mores and are The Town and the City(1950), On the stereotypes of a spiritually defunct society, Road(1957), The Subterraneans(1958), The lacking originality and glory, became the apt Dharma Bums(1958), Lonesome progenitors or harbingers of the ‘New Vision’ Traveler(1960), Book of Dreams(1960), Big which was unequivocally reflected in the bulk Sur(1962), Desolation Angels(1965) et al. The of their novels and poetry. This coterie of repertoire of Kerouac’s literary works is not free, artistic souls included Jack Kerouac, only a critique of America gone wayward but Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs, Gregory it is a powerful compendium of the new Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Neal Cassady, counterculture’s or the Beat generation’s Gary Snyder and others who with their repugnance towards the same while talking unique brand of a flamboyant, liberated and about its own mass of existential woes and experimental writing and themes gave despair. American people and literature an The Town and the City delineates the life- astonishingly new horizon to feel and story of the protagonist who abandons his explore. They wrote novels, poetry and non- rural life and shifts to town in search of fiction works that vented out their excessive finding/forging an identity of his own. Beat existential ennui, and limned a beautiful figures like Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, panorama of life that they had embarked Lucien Carr, William Burroughs, Joan Vollmer onto—the life of road trips, travel, adventure, and David Kammerer populate the story as friendships, love, drugs, Buddhist philosophy the protagonist’s friends and the novel and way of living. unfolds successively each character’s The fiction of Jack Kerouac was no mishaps. With the central theme of home- exception. Like the other writers of the Beat leaving, the novel can be construed as the ilk, he wrote novels that reflected the youth’s nascent commencement of Kerouac’s Research Paper IJRAR- International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews 179 [ VOLUME 2 I ISSUE 4 I OCT. – DEC. 2015] E ISSN 2348 –1269, PRINT ISSN 2349-5138 existential odyssey. His next novel On the construed as Kerouac’s exercise in stylistic Road is considered as a cult piece of American and writing skills with the Freudian concept literary counterculture giving a mesmerizing of dreams playing an important role in an account of the quest that the protagonists Sal artist’s/ writer’s process of writing. Defying Paradise and Dean Moriarty had embarked any genre-categorization, the book with its upon. Reminiscent of Mark Twain’s The freely-juxtaposed dream images, comes to Huckleberry Finn and Fitzgerald’s The Great ratify Kerouac’s original attempts at an avant- Gatsby, On The Road beautifully delves deep garde way of writing. Big Sur describes the into the existential themes of freedom, three significant sojourns of Kerouac, individuality, friendship and love and disguised in the novel as Jack Duluoz, at his becomes a classic study of the inward journey friend’s place (the actual friend here is of man. With his Subterraneans, Kerouac Lawrence Ferlinghetti) and the former’s came forth with a semi-autobiographical debilitating health in the wake of his account of his own life describing his love life eminence as an established writer and the and its tempestuous side. The novel is also a concurrent smothering public glare and panoramic story of the subculture life --- attention that he gets. Unlike Kerouac’s other entailing its enveloping smog and novels, the protagonist herein is famous but convergence of the artistic and visionary like his all other novels the deep exhaustion souls with their aspirations and dreams of with life is seen here also and the desire to cutting across the trite Americanism and renounce everything and sip on the nectar of forging new vistas and worlds. The Dharma wilderness is on a high. Desolation Angels, a Bums, like most of his fictional pieces, thematic successor to The Dharma Bums, contains the real-life Beat figures as its once again shows Kerouac at the existential characters: the narrator Raymond Smith who crossroads torn between the call of can be identified with Kerouac himself and peacefulness in the wild and the enticement the Buddhist poet Japhy Ryder as a thinly- of the flashy city-life. This novel too burns disguised Gary Snyder. Herein again, the with the existential anguish, dilemma and enigma of life is explored by Kerouac as we thirst of the Beat angels. witness his protagonist Ray Smith going ‘out Kerouac wrote his novels in what he defined there’ in search of some fix, a fix that can as the ‘spontaneous prose’ style of writing reconcile him with life and its precariousness. whereby he wrote as if from a reservoir of The two seekers, Smith and Ryder, together unconscious imaginary/artistic triggers. A as the titular Dharma Bums, hitchhike, perusal of his writings at times baffles the traverse the countryside, go mountaineering, readers and we begin to find ourselves meditate, indulge in poetry and also party at stunned by the very beauty of the spectacle of nights, absolutely emancipated from their his gigantic, free-flowing prose. respective encumbrances and obligations of Kerouac’s fictional oeuvre reverberated the mainstream material lives. Sequestered from mood and spirit of his generation that was everything around, they live an idyllic life of besieged by the overwhelming questions of harmony and sweetness. Lonesome Traveler the life that they were living. The youth happens to be an assemblage of sketches and wanted to initiate an inquiry into the whys short essays of non-fiction nature and hows of life, of society. They sought documenting beautifully Kerouac’s different answers to the state of things as they were. sojourns, jobs and experiences as a writer. Through his writings, Kerouac as a With the sporadic dashes of poetry, representative youth, wanted to look at the aphoristic expatiations on life, truth, world around him in a different manner so beingness, the Lonesome Traveler holds a true that he could elicit his interpretation of the mirror to Kerouac’s take on life. Book of world he inhabited and could come up with Dreams an experimental piece of writing, his set of valid values. His genre of literature - taken as a rendition of his dream diary that -- a nomadic, bohemian corpus of his travels, he preserved from 1952-1960, can be adventures, sojourns, road trips drenched in

180 IJRAR- International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews Research Paper [ VOLUME 2 I ISSUE 4 I OCT. – DEC. 2015] E ISSN 2348 –1269, PRINT ISSN 2349-5138 IJRAR Impact Factor 3.215 philosophical musings, meetings with friends, know constantly that this is only you, God, spiritual retreats, Buddhist experiences --- empty and awake and eternally free as the comes to coalesce a fiction of sublime vision unnumerable atoms of emptiness and beauty that transcends all hitherto everywhere…. known literary genres. Heavily influenced by …Murky human ideas smoking like French symbolist writings, the Whitmanian factories on the horizon through which I verse and the deliberate use of alcohols and would walk, forward…” (Kerouac 112) drugs like marijuana, morphine, Benzedrine, The burning desire to unravel the mystery of Jack Kerouac was surely on the right road to life is explicitly conveyed in On The Road too, newer revelations and insights on life. The when the protagonist utters in astonishment wallowing in of drugs was a means to both and dismay, spiritual and creative ends. “ What is he aching to do? What are we all A scathing critique of the ongoing aching to do? What do we want?..”(Kerouac sociological, cultural and political upheavals 221) in contemporary America, the works of The road becomes a powerful metaphor for Kerouac lampooned the man-engineered life and the trajectory to fulfillment of his paradigms of destruction and oppression. spiritual goals. Kerouac foresees something The evil of war and political hegemony is magical and absolutely pure in the existence castigated by Kerouac in his novel On the of the road, as though it symbolized for him Road when one of the characters exclaims, life itself, “..we had longer ways to go. But no “..The bastards right now are only interested matter, the road is life..”( Kerouac 192) The in seeing if they can blow up the world..”( road trip undertaken by Sal Paradise and Kerouac 139) Dean Moriarty becomes an eternal epiphany In his Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac of sorts for them. They keep rolling on the rhapsodizes about the alleys of life wherein road to knowing. There is a conspicuous man is perennially embroiled. Spiritual hankering for the IT. This IT can be meanderings, visualizations of God, man as interpreted as the ultimate truth, the final embodying Godness, his inevitable return destination, God or some absolute from the natural world to the concrete jungle consummation, of city-life replete with its nebulosity and “… ‘Man, this will finally take us to IT!’..” fever --- come to form the spirit and content (242) of this novel. Very beautifully Kerouac brings Having copiously expatiated upon the home the crux of life that lies in mutual pictures of life, his perspectives on it, Kerouac empathy and benevolence. He sees man in also ends his literary odyssey with all God and God in man. His abstractions point openness for the readers to either accept or out how eventually he, like many others who reject his understanding and notions about tread the temporal world’ pathways, would life and which proves his catholicity as a end up returning to it. writer and human being too. He says, “…Because sensation is emptiness, old age is “When you’ve understood this scripture, emptiness. – ‘T’s only the Golden Eternity of throw it away. If you cant understand this God’s Mind so practice kindness and scripture, throw it away. I insist on your sympathy, remember that men are not freedom…” (Kerouac 16) responsible in themselves as men for their Works Cited ignorance and unkindness, they should be 1. Keroauc, Jack. On The Road. Penguin pitied, God does pity it, because who says India, 2000. anything about anything since everything is 2. Kerouac, Jack. Lonesome Traveler. just what it is, free of interpretations. – God is Penguin Books, 2018. not the ‘attainer’, he is the ‘farer’ in that 3. Kerouac, Jack. The Scripture of the which everything is, the ‘abider’ – one Golden Eternity. Martino Fine caterpillar, a thousand hairs of God. – So Books,2018.

Research Paper IJRAR- International Journal of Research and Analytical Reviews 181