Symbolic Analysis of On the Road

Abstract

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is considered as one of the most important novels in the twentieth century. It holds a great deal of historical significance, showing a picture of American subculture which is characterized with sex, drugs, and lost youth, but this kind of subculture attracted little public attention of academic critics during the 1940s and 1950s. Reflecting on the social settings in which this novel was created, it is imperative for readers to get an idea of why this novel was not immediately recognized by critics after it was completed. After World War II, a sensibility began to take over the general consciousness. Conformity and normalcy had become standards of the time after the upheavals of wartime. But the novel On the Road is infested with the current contents which are inconsistent with the mainstream culture, showing to all of us an America totally different from the one organized with conformity and normalcy. The Beat pioneers sowed the seeds of discontent in the youth generation of America, which would evolve into a series of radical movements in the future to the 1960s and 1970s.