Social Context of Literature: Kerouac’s On the Road Essay Example

with his mad friend Dean, and jazz, drink, girls, drugs, and freedom” (Cunnell, 2007, p.

).In a very real way, On the Road is a first hand account of a tale which is culturally accurate, given that the book is largely autobiographical. In a letter to his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac himself described his passionate writing, “I’ve telled all the road now… went fast because the road is fast…whole thing on a strip of paper 120 foot long… just rolled it through the typewriter and in fact no paragraphs… rolled it out on floor and it looks like a road” (Cunnell, 2007, p. 1).Kerouac’s writing is impulsive and instinctual, characterizing the cultural trend of the Beat Generation in the 1950s as a group of individuals immersed in passionate abandon. Cunnell describes the social atmosphere in a very poignant way, saying that “Kerouac’s clattering typewriter is folded in with Jackson Pollock’s furious brushstrokes and Charlie Parker’s escalating and spiraling alto saxophone choruses in a trinity representing the breakthrough of a new postwar counterculture seemingly built on sweat, immediacy, and instinct, rather than apprenticeship, craft, and daring practice” (2007, p.

).As a counterargument, one can also say that the Beat Generation was intense and destructive, with a dark side to the nature of living on impulse (Swartz, 1999, p. xi). Rejecting all social constraints, members of the Beat Generation like Jack Kerouac were obsessed with the extremely individualist idea of living on the edge and living for oneself.