Jack Kerorouac Beat Generation

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Sarah Naismith English 3 AP 2nd Period March 8, 2018 Jack Kerouac and The Beat Generation World War Ⅱ impacted American society in many and varied ways. However, there was one shining light in the forest of darkness and depression, The Beat Generation. No one could ever have guessed that a group of men could have created one of the most iconic cultural rebellion in American history for decades to come. The Beat Generation started out with only four people the iconic Jack Kerouac, his best friend and novel inspiration Neal Cassady, the older but wiser William S. Burroughs, and Kerouac’s other close friend and writer of Howl a piece of poetry that first shaped the culture of the U.S. in the late 1950s and early 1960s Allen Ginsberg. No one …show more content…

The novel On the Road is based on Kerouac’s real life experiences in America with one of his close friends Neal Cassady. Most of the book deals with metaphors like “at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future." This sentence uses geography terms East and West to symbolize how far apart his youth and his future are from each other and how it can change him for the better. Throughout the book Jack Kerouac makes it clear that while he was writing On the Road he made all of his close friends, including Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs. The most important person in his close knit group of friends was Neal Cassady mainly due to the reason that Neal was the one of the two main characters in his book. “This is the most open statement of Sal’s desire to “be along for the ride”, all the time he lives out his dream experiences, he is at the same time recording it all as material for this exact novel we are reading.” not everyone believes the best of Jack Kerouac’s books as David L. Ulin says in his article about Jack’s novel On the Road, “Time, however, catches up with everything, including "On the Road." David Ulin’s idea that time eventually catches up with everyone makes him speculate how the book should be perceived. Throughout the decades of The Beat Generation’s fame …show more content…

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