Jack Kerouac is an unconventional and controversial American novelist. He was once called “most misunderstood and underestimated writer.” Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in an old manufacturing town on the Merrimac River. Kerouac’s parents, both devouted to Roman Catholics came from rural communities in the French-Speaking part of Quebec, and French was the language spoken in the Kerouac’s home.
As a member of the Beat Generation, Kerouac used drugs both as a social statement of rebellion and for artistic insight. In fact, he consciously entered into a well-established tradition of writers looking to drugs as modern-day muses. Within this legacy, drugs were commonly viewed as chemical gateways to a transcendental realm of visionary
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The simplest description of the cutup is calling it an arbitrary combination of two sentences. In the book, Writers at works, Burroughs explains, “Cutups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of vision consequently expands” (154). The cutup allows the reader ″to think in association blocks rather than words″ (150). Burroughs’s ″association block″ is best thought of as a mental picture, similar to Kerouac’s goal to think in pictures rather than words. Burroughs even praised language systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics as superior to the English alphabet for communicating through an image-based system. The letters of the English alphabet are also symbols at least phonetic ones. While, Burroughs often employed the cutup technique purposefully, he reasoned that even a random pairing, that seemed initially illogical or nonsensical at first could still produce novel insights. If nothing else, he believed that, abnormal word pairings could free the mind from its typical linear conditioning, what he called “a sort of superstitious reverence for the word” (153). Burroughs compared the results of the cutup to an increased range of perception. It beings aware of what is going around through one’s peripheral vision rather than focusing one’s gaze on a limited central point (156-57). This description of the cutup is similar to Grilly’s finding, that marijuana allows ideas extraneous to an individual’s focus to enter the field of consciousness and thereby loosen association