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Conformity In Jack Kerouac's On The Road

1423 Words6 Pages

Why did the Beats reject the middle class expectations of conformity? In order to fully understand and properly answer this question a reader must first define “Beats”. Beats: people or a generation that had a relaxed view towards sex, drugs, and religion; thrived on arts and culture; a sympathetic people. In Jack Kerouac's novel “On the Road” the character Sal and his friends are viewed as Beats, and in the novel Sal is living his life so that he can be satisfied, have a since of freedom, and even fall in love with all people no matter if they are poor, immigrants, or African Americans. In fact, Kerouac or Sal as he is depicted in the book rejects the expectations of middle class conformity along with all the Beats because they were dissatisfied, …show more content…

The constant need of money for drugs, alcohol, housing, and love causes the most of the Beats to become poverty stricken and in someways unable to climb up the economical ladder also the Beats are mostly artists which sometimes does not allow for much pay. This quote from the novel “Ma, what is that fellow?” “Why. that’s a ho-bo.” “Ma, I want to be a ho-bo someday.” “Shut your mouth, that’s not for the like of the Hazards.” But he never forgot that day, and when he grew up, after a short spell playing football at LSU, he did become a hobo. Big Slim and I spent many nights telling stories and spitting tobacco juice in paper containers.” (Kerouac 19). sheds an interesting light on poverty and makes the reader question what they believe poverty is and even maybe make the reader question the American dream. Sal is clearly sympathetic with Slim Jim as he also knows what it is like to suffer from poverty. Although Sal could always just write his aunt for more money he had personally gone through poverty him self. The quote “I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control. All I could see of the morning was a whiteness like the whiteness of the tomb. I was starving to death. All I had left in the form of calories were the last of the cough drops I’d bought in Shelton, Nebraska, months ago; these I sucked for their sugar. I didn’t know how to panhandle. I stumbled out of town with barely enough strength to reach the city limits.”(Kerouac 62) shows how Sal had a run about with poverty. The message that Sal was trying to convey was that people such as the middle class did not know what the struggle was until they had experienced it first hand as he had. This constant spending of money and moving from place to place causes many Beats to struggle from poverty and grow a rejection towards what the middle

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