Article
Analysis of On The Road by Jack Kerouac (1957)
Grace Audina
audina.grace@ymail.com
English
Department Teachers Training and Pedagogy Faculty
Muhammdiyah
University of Tangerang
ABSTRACT
Sebuah
karya Jack Kerouac yang berjudul “On The Road” diterbitkan pada tahun
1957. Pada tahun itu, banyak
kejadian-kejadian yang menginspirasi Jack Kerouac dalam karya-karyanya, salah
satunya adalah On The Road (1957). Terdapat beberapa temuan yang dapat
ditemukan pada cerita tersebut, tetapi artikel ini hanya menjelaskan salah satu
dari banyaknya temuan-temuan tersebut. Tujuan dari pembuatan artikel ini adalah
mengemukakan salah satu fokus studi kami dalam cerita On The Road. Artikel ini
membahas tentang analisis diskriminasi ras yang terjadi nyata di cerita On The
Road dan berkaitan pula dengan kebijakan hak-hak sipil kaum Afro-Amerika pada
masa jabatan Presiden Truman. Hasil yang kami temukan adalah terdapat beberapa
bukti bahwa kebijakan yang dikeluarkan oleh Presiden Truman tidak sepenuhnya
efektif pada masa itu pada beberapa adegan pada film On the Road yang telah
dirilis tahun 2012.
Keywords
: Blacks, Discrimination, Movie, Novel, United
states, Truman, Whites
1. Background
Plot
In 1947 in New York, when Sal and Carlo were in a
cafe, his friend, Chad, introduced a man named Dean. He was a criminal who
often commit crimes such as stealing and dating with a wide range of women.
Dean had a wife named Marylou who was 16 years old. Then they began to threw a
party with alcohol and drugs. After so long became friends in New York, Carlo
and Dean chose to move to Denver. then as usual Sal's life was back to write
for his book. After so long not met with his friend, he felt homesick and
decided to follow them to Denver with jockey rely solely on passing cars. until
he arrived in Denver, no different from their activities, namely partying
drinks, drugs and having sex with women. One day at the time in Denver, Carlo,
one of Sal's friends told that he liked Dean, it means he was a gay. He felt
sad because he knew that Dean did not like man like him, Carlo said "I know that the dean did not like men, but I
was so infatuated with him. my first time of its part of the relationship of
men" (On The Road, 34:56 minutes). Then because felt ignored by the
Dean, then Carlo chose to go to southern Africa as Rimbaud.
Then Sal went back home to New York. but on the way
he ran out of money and it forced him to stop his journey in Selma, California.
while on the bus, he met a local woman named Terry. Sal and Terry became
farmers. Terry was local farmer, while Sal became farmer just to add an
allowance in order to return to New York. Then they gradually became very
familiar, so Terry fell in love with Sal. While in Selma, Sal must immediately
return to New York to continue writing his book "I could feel my whole body told me to go back to New York, I still have
a book to be written" (On the Road, 41:52 minutes). Sal only a few
days in Selma, California so he had to leave Terry. Very long journey to get to
New York that he traveled only by foot and car jockey. Even from spring until
winter he passed on his way to his home in New York.
Already
one year Sal
did not meet with Dean. "One more year I have not met with the
Dean". the narrator said "I just stay at home to
spend time trying to finish
the manuscript on my desk. very boring"
(On the Road, 44:55 minutes).
December 1948, in Sal’s sister’s house, North
Carolina. right on Christmas Day. Sal large family get together. suddenly Dean,
Marylou and Dean's friend Ed Dunkel came there to meet Sal. Although Sal's
family looks very disturbed their presence, but they still accept the arrival
of them. Dean even promising Sal's mother to take her to New York along with
their car. On the way to New York,
Sally's mother and
the other had a little problem on the car
ride, they ran
out of gas while in South Hill,
Virginia. without a guard, Dean and
Ed toying with the
price of gasoline engines to not spend a
lot of money. Sal's mother looks shocked
with what Dean
and Ed did. then Sal
tell his mother
that "President Truman said that we
must reduce the cost of living" (On the Road, 52:10 minutes).
After several days of
arriving in New York, in early 1949, which is
precisely the new year. Sal and
his friends held
a party in an apartment. After various long journey, they
arrived in San Francisco, California. Dean then immediately left along the Sal
and Marylou in a hotel, he reasoned would like to see his second wife named
Camille because they already have a child. and after spending one night in the
hotel along with Sal. Next morning, Sal found Marylou had returned to Denver to
resume a normal life with her fiance who was a sailor. then Marylou back to
Denver, Sal's life became so difficult.
He had to work as porters of goods and after that he met Dean in San
Francisco (Dean's Wife's house). Then they both went to just watch jazz, having
gone with Sal, Dean fight with his wife, because he prefers to wander rather
than taking care of his wife and children. after he expelled from the house,
and he took Sal to New York, but before going to New York, they decided to
Denver first aims to find Dean's father. When he got in Denver Dean did not
find his father and they went on a trip to New York (1950).
After few days in New York, Dean
asked Sal to go to Mexico City. Dean said “Let’s
go to west (Mexico), Dont you know right that I can speak spanish?” (On the
Road, 1:55:45).
They had fun in downtown Mexico
with the girls, marijuanas, and some parties. because too much marijuana. Then
one night, Sal suffered dysentery but when Sal getting sick. Dean left Sal
alone in a motel room, he said “poor sal,
getting sick. poor sal, getting sick! Dysentery, man. I have to divorce
Camillie eventhough you sick. I have to go now, good bye Sal!” (On the
Road, 02:03:19) and took Sal's money for going home. Because it did not have a
sense of responsibility, then Dean immediately left Sal.
Ozone Park, 1951.
Sal received a letter from his
friend Carlo in the form of poetry and Sal know Carlo had died from the letter
that Carlo was a heroin addiction. he was sad to lose his best friend.
December, 1951.
A year passed after Sal no longer
met with Dean, Sal have a better life by being an author. When Sal waiting for
someone with a suit like those already established. then there was a man who
came and called him "Hey..Sal"
(On the Road, 02:19:42). Turned out it was Dean, Sal shocked by the physical
appearance of Dean who looked thinner and dirtier than before, and Dean told
Sal a little that his wife wanted him to return to Camille. After that Sal just
leaving Dean in there. He wanted to give a lesson on Dean, because when Sal got
sick in Mexico, Dean was also left him. Then when he was in home, Sal thought
about making a book that tells the story of his life with Dean Moriarty.
Jack
Kerouac’s Life
Born
on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac's writing career
began in the 1940s, but didn't meet with commercial success until 1957, when On the Road was published. The book became an
American classic that defined the Beat Generation. Kerouac died on October 21,
1969, from an abdominal hemorrhage, at age 47.
Early
Life
Famed writer Jack Kerouac was born
Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac on March 12, 1922, in Lowell, Massachusetts. A thriving
mill town in the mid-19th century, Lowell had become, by the time of Jack
Kerouac's birth, a down-and-out burg where unemployment and heavy drinking
prevailed. Kerouac's parents, Leo and Gabrielle, were immigrants from Quebec,
Canada; Kerouac learned to speak French at home before he learned English at
school. Leo Kerouac owned his own print shop, Spotlight Print, in downtown
Lowell, and Gabrielle Kerouac, known to her children as Memere, was a
homemaker. Kerouac later described the family's home life: "My father
comes home from his printing shop and undoes his tie and removes [his] 1920s
vest, and sits himself down at hamburger and boiled potatoes and bread and
butter, and with the kiddies and the good wife."
Jack Kerouac endured a childhood tragedy
in the summer of 1926, when his beloved older brother Gerard died of rheumatic
fever at the age of 9. Drowning in grief, the Kerouac family embraced their
Catholic faith more deeply. Kerouac's writing is full of vivid memories of
attending church as a child: "From the open door of the church warm and
golden light swarmed out on the snow. The sound of the organ and singing could
be heard."
Kerouac's two favorite childhood
pastimes were reading and sports. He devoured all the 10-cent fiction magazines
available at the local stores, and he also excelled at football, basketball and
track. Although Kerouac dreamed of becoming a novelist and writing the
"great American novel," it was sports, not writing, that Kerouac
viewed as his ticket to a secure future. With the onset of the Great
Depression, the Kerouac family suffered from financial difficulties, and
Kerouac's father turned to alcohol and gambling to cope. His mother took a job
at a local shoe factory to boost the family income, but, in 1936, the Merrimack
River flooded its banks and destroyed Leo Kerouac's print shop, sending him
into a spiral of worsening alcoholism and condemning the family to poverty.
Kerouac, who was, by that time, a star running back on the Lowell High School
football team, saw football as his ticket to a college scholarship, which in
turn might allow him to secure a good job and save his family's finances.
Literary
Beginnings
Upon graduating from high school in
1939, Kerouac received a football scholarship to Columbia University, but first
he had to attend a year of preparatory school at the Horace Mann School for
Boys in Brooklyn. So, at the age of 17, Kerouac packed his bags and moved to
New York City, where he was immediately awed by the limitless new experiences
of big city life. Of the many wonderful new things Kerouac discovered in New
York, and perhaps the most influential on his life, was jazz. He described the
feeling of walking past a jazz club in Harlem: "Outside, in the street,
the sudden music which comes from the nitespot fills you with yearning for some
intangible joy—and you feel that it can only be found within the smoky confines
of the place." It was also during his year at Horace Mann that Kerouac
first began writing seriously. He worked as a reporter for the Horace Mann Record, and
published short stories in the school's literary magazine, the Horace Mann Quarterly.
The following year, in 1940, Kerouac
began his freshman year as a football player and aspiring writer at Columbia
University. However, he broke his leg in one of his first games and was
relegated to the sidelines for the rest of the season. Although his leg had
healed, Kerouac's coach refused to let him play the next year, and Kerouac
impulsively quit the team and dropped out of college. He spent the next year
working odd jobs and trying to figure out what to make of his life. He spent a
few months pumping gas in Hartford, Connecticut. Then he hopped a bus to
Washington, D.C., and worked on a construction crew building the Pentagon in
Arlington, Virginia. Eventually Kerouac decided to join the military to fight
for his country in World War II. He enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 1943, but
was honorably discharged after only 10 days of service for what his medical
report described as "strong schizoid trends."
After his discharge from the Marines,
Kerouac returned to New York City and fell in with a group of friends that
would eventually define a literary movement. He befriended Allen Ginsberg, a
Columbia student, and William Burroughs, another college dropout and aspiring
writer. Together, these three friends would go on to become the leaders of the
Beat Generation of writers.
Living in New York in the late 1940s,
Kerouac wrote his first novel, Town
and City, a highly autobiographical tale about the intersection of small
town family values and the excitement of city life. The novel was published in
1950 with the help of Ginsberg's Columbia professors, and although the
well-reviewed book earned Kerouac a modicum of recognition, it did not make him
famous.
'On
the Road'
Another of Kerouac's New York friends in
the late 1940s was Neal Cassady; the two took several cross-country road trips
to Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, and even Mexico City. These trips provided the
inspiration for Kerouac's next and greatest novel, On the Road, a barely
fictionalized account of these road trips packed with sex, drugs and jazz.
Kerouac's writing of On the
Road in 1951 is the stuff of
legend: He wrote the entire novel over one three-week bender of frenzied
composition, on a single scroll of paper that was 120 feet long.
Like most legends, the story of the
whirlwind composition of On
the Road is part fact and
part fiction. Kerouac did, in fact, write the novel on a single scroll in three
weeks, but he had also spent several years making notes in preparation for this
literary outburst. Kerouac termed this style of writing "spontaneous
prose" and compared it to the improvisation of his beloved jazz musicians.
Revision, he believed, was akin to lying and detracted from the ability of
prose to capture the truth of a moment.
However, publishers dismissed Kerouac's
single-scroll manuscript, and the novel remained unpublished for six years.
When it was finally published in 1957, On
the Road became an
instant classic, bolstered by a review in The
New York Times that
proclaimed, "Just as, more than any other novel of the '20s, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament
of the 'Lost Generation,' so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the
'Beat Generation'." As Kerouac's girlfriend at the time, Joyce Johnson,
put it, "Jack went to bed obscure and woke up famous."
Later
Works
In the six years that passed between the
composition and publication of On
the Road, Kerouac traveled extensively; experimented with Buddhism; and
wrote many novels that went unpublished at the time. His next published novel, The Dharma Bums (1958), described Kerouac's clumsy
steps toward spiritual enlightenment on a mountain climb with friend Gary
Snyder, a Zen poet. Dharma was followed that same year by the
novel The Subterraneans,
and in 1959, Kerouac published three novels: Dr.
Sax, Mexico City Blues andMaggie Cassidy.
Kerouac's most famous later novels
include Book of Dreams (1961), Big Sur(1962), Visions of Gerard (1963) and Vanity of Duluoz (1968). Kerouac also wrote poetry in
his later years, composing mostly long-form free verse as well as his own
version of the Japanese haiku form. Additionally, Kerouac released several
albums of spoken word poetry during his lifetime.
Final
Years
Despite maintaining a prolific pace of
publishing and writing, Kerouac was never able to cope with the fame he
achieved after On the Road,
and his life soon devolved into a blur of drunkenness and drug addiction. He
married Edie Parker in 1944, but their marriage ended in divorce after only a
few months. In 1950, Kerouac married Joan Haverty, who gave birth to his only
daughter, Jan Kerouac, but this second marriage also ended in divorce after
less than a year. Kerouac married Stella Sampas, who was also from Lowell, in
1966. He died from an abdominal hemorrhage three years later, on October 21,
1969, at the age of 47, in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Legacy
More than four decades after his death,
Jack Kerouac continues to capture the imagination of wayward and rebellious
youth. One of the most enduring American novels of all time, On the Road appears on virtually every list of the
100 greatest American novels. Kerouac's words, spoken through the narrator Sal
Paradise, continue to inspire today's youth with the power and clarity with
which they inspired the youth of his own time: "The only people for me are
the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a
commonplace thing, but burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles."
On
The Road’s Novel and Movie
Author : Jack Kerouac
Country
: United States
Languange
: English
Publisher
: Viking Press
Publication
Date : 5th September 1957
Media
Type : Print (hardback and paperback)
Pages
: 320 pages
On
The Road’s Movie
On
the Road (French: Sur la route) is a 2012 adventure drama film directed
by Walter Salles. It is an adaptation ofJack Kerouac's 1957 novel of the same name and stars an ensemble cast featuring Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley,Kristen Stewart, Alice Braga, Amy Adams, Tom Sturridge, Danny Morgan, Elisabeth Moss, Kirsten Dunst, and Viggo Mortensen. The executive producer was Francis Ford Coppola.
Filming began on August 4, 2010, in Montreal,Quebec, with a $25 million budget.
The story is based on the
years Kerouac spent travelling the United States in the late 1940s with his
friend Neal Cassady and
several other Beat Generation figures who would go on to fame in
their own right, including William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.
On May 23, 2012, the film
premiered in competition for the Palme d'Or at
the 2012 Cannes Film
Festival. The film received mixed early reviews after it premiered
at the film festival. The film also premiered at the 2012
Toronto International Film Festival in September.
- Result
and Findings
There are many findings we found in this
story by Jack Kerouac, such as discrimination/racism, beat generation, economic
in United States, dependent women, gay and lesbian, masculinity, etc. But our
focus in this article is about discrimination/racism in United States on
Truman’s Period. As an introduction, we will show readers about the situation
in United States while this story was begun.
On The Road by Jack Kerouac was published
in 1957, and the movie was released in 2012. But the setting of time in this
story was 1947 to 1951. During 1947-1951, Harry S. Truman was in charge of
leading Unites States as president. He led US from 1945 to 1953.
Why
do we express that our finding is about discrimination/racism?
Because in several scenes, it can be
seen clearly that there were discrimination/racism between blacks and whites,
such as :
1) Scene
: 1
Sal
and Dean went to a bar which was fulled by blacks. There was no more whites
inside, except them. Almost all of them was blacks. We conclude that at the
moment, blacks had not socialized with blacks yet at all. (minutes : 13.41)
2) Scene
: 2
Dean
and Sal introduced themselves to a black man in a bar. They drunk, smoked, and
talked much. One of their talks was about blacks vs whites. The black musician
man asked them “what if i were married with a white woman?”, then Dean said “
it seems you never with white woman?”, then the man said “yes”. We conclude
that at the moment, black guy would only married with black girl and vice
versa. Even they made it as a joke. The black musician man said ‘ but I ever
with a white guy” (minutes : 16.36)
3) Scene
3 :
Sal
walked in a street fulled by blacks. As far as Sal walking, blacks always
looked at him. Then Sal looked at a woman, he smiled at her but she said “What
the hell are you looking at?’, so Sal bowed his head for avoiding her face. We
conclude that blacks still didn’t want to socialize with whites at the moment.
There were still dicrimination. (minutes: 94.40)
4) Scene
4 :
Sal
was sick and dreamt about people around him angry because he was white, such as
Terry, Carlo, etc. We conclude, it could not be denied that whites were in
charge of blacks’s destiny who considered them as slaves for very long time.
(minutes: 121.17)
After analyzing briefly about the scenes
showing discrimination/racism between blacks vs whites and Unites States’s
President, Harry S. Truman, we will show more about President Truman and his
policy about racism and discrimination.
The policy was “President’s Commision on
Civil Rights”. This policy is about anti-racism for Afro-American in United
States. But Jack Kerouac wrote the situation different from Truman’s policy.
The big point for our analysis is there
were still many discrimination/racism in United States and Truman’s policy was
not effective at all at the moment, eventhough Harry S. Truman is an important
figure for Afro-American until now.
- Conclusion
On The Road by Jack Kerouac was
published in 1957, United States, by Viking Press. This story is about Sal
Paradise’s life story traveling around United States. In the winter of 1947,
the reckless and joyous Dean Moriarty, fresh out of another stint in jail and
newly married, comes to New York City and meets Sal Paradise, a young writer
with an intellectual group of friends, among them the poet Carlo Marx. Dean
fascinates Sal, and their friendship begins three years of restless journeys
back and forth across the country. With a combination of bus rides and
adventurous hitchhiking escapades, Sal goes to his much-dreamed-of west to join
Dean and more friends in Denver, and then continues west by himself, working as
a fieldworker in California for awhile, among other things. The next year, Dean
comes east to Sal again, foiling Sal's stable life once more, and they drive
west together, with more crazy adventures on the way at Bull Lee's in New Orleans,
ending in San Francisco this time. The winter after that, Sal goes to Dean, and
they blaze across the country together in friendly fashion, and Dean settles in
New York for awhile. In the spring, Sal goes to Denver alone, but Dean soon
joins him and they go south all the way to Mexico City this time. Through all
of this constant movement, there is an array of colorful characters, shifting
landscapes, dramas, and personal development. Dean, a big womanizer, will have
three wives and four children in the course of these three years. Perceptive
Sal, who at the beginning is weakened and depressed, gains in joy and
confidence and finds love at the end. At first Sal is intrigued by Dean because
Dean seems to have the active, impulsive passion that Sal lacks, but they turn
out to have a lot more in common.
According to our group, there was a
hidden message from Jack Kerouac in On The Road (1957), it was about
racism/discrimination. We analyzed it based on the scenes on the movie (2012)
that prove our analysis.
References
Kerouac, Jack. 2001. On The Road. New York: Frenchie.
Biro Program Informasi
Internasional. 2005. Garis Besar Sejarah
Amerika Serikat. Jakarta : Departemen Luar Negeri A.S.
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