This alternative culture provided a new kind of diversity for America. America could now afford, within its borders, a youth culture distrustful of modernity and rebellious against notions of conformity. One could opt out of the political spectrum and even the traditional cultural norms in order to live a very different kind of life. Kerouac's America, as depicted in On the Road, is a vastly different land. The average American hoped to stay somewhere in the middle, out of the way and out of trouble, living in a culture where it could be dangerous to rock the boat. The totalitarian authority of Stalin's USSR was clear on the left, while the repression of McCarthyism from the right was being given a pass by many citizens. Politically, the world seemed to be torn between two Cold War extremes. The pop culture of the time reinforced that culture through television programs including My Three Sons and The Donna Reed Show, and books like How to Win Friends and Influence People helped people gain success in their jobs. Achievement in this period was classified as being able to rise to middle management and as raising children who conformed to the rules and sensibilities of the hegemonic culture. The ideal male was, as of old, someone who would father children, settle down with a wife, and take one of the factory or office jobs proliferating in post-war America. This was the era of upward mobility and the company man. As soldiers returned home from war, family and jobs took on great importance once again.
Their journeys document a period in history in which America grew into its new status as the political, financial, industrial, and technological leader of the world-with some resistance. The travels documented in On the Road were fictionalized yet based on real travels that Kerouac took with his friend Neil Cassady. No writing of the time better characterized this generation than On the Road. The Beats sowed the seeds of discontent in the youth of America that would grow into the radical movements of the 1960s and '70s.
The publication of On the Road in 1957 cemented the "Beat Generation" as an undeniable and important phenomenon. On the Road, however, showed the rest of America a culture it barely knew existed. Conformity and normalcy had become standards of the time after the upheavals of wartime. The novel documents a time in America when a post-World War II sensibility began to take over the general consciousness. It holds a great deal of historical significance, showing an underbelly of American culture full of sex, drugs, and lost youth, a culture that received little public attention during the 1940s and '50s. Jack Kerouac's On the Road can be considered among the most important novels of the twentieth century.
0 kommentar(er)
