Fifty years later, 'On the Road' still beckons
Young people are still drawn to Jack Kerouac's novel, but these days they're not as likely to set out on their own.
from the September 5, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
Young people today say that reading Kerouac inspires them to travel, but in a different way than the hitchhiking "rucksack revolutionaries" of the 1950s. Moira Burke, a junior at Emmanuel College in Boston, says she loves the "free-spirited sense of searching for yourself" in the novel. She plans to study in Rome this fall and says the book made her realize that "there's so much that people miss by staying in the same place."
But Helena Turner, a sophomore at Bates College in Maine, says, "The way Kerouac deviated from the norm, and just dropped out of school and went cross country is something that people just don't entertain as an option anymore. The culture right now is: Finish high school, go to college, get a job...." Nevertheless, she says Kerouac's message still resonates with her generation. "It's cool to think about his ideas, and maybe take a year off before college to travel."
Kerouac's influence on 20-somethings has shifted, say several professors who teach Beat literature. "Maybe they are transitioning from living the life to reflecting on it from a distance," says Professor Holladay. "And that's a good thing, because if you try to emulate the Beat writers too much, it can take you down a dangerous path. I don't want my students to think drinking, for example, is how they get closer to Kerouac. The way to get closer to Kerouac is to get closer to his work and to people who enjoy his work."
US college students see competition for jobs and access to higher education as too fierce today to stray from the path, says Professor Johnson. "The stakes are very high – there's a much wider gap between the haves and the have-nots, and a lot less mobility."
In the late '50s, Kerouac addressed a generation that sought an alternative to being "tied to a mortgage" and resisted the censorship of the cold war, she adds. Today's young readers are more sophisticated, she says, and their knowledge of world cultures and race relations makes them approach Kerouac with a more critical eye.
Emily Crews, a recently returned Peace Corps volunteer in Stanford, Calif., says the adventures of the characters in "On the Road" seem selfish. "It's the diary of a man of privilege who fails to see so much of the pain of others' lives in his haze of self-concern, physical love, and drugs," she writes in her review of the book on . "I felt this to be a story of a young man who was so absorbed in himself he had difficultly seeing the rest of the world."
Even readers who were once inspired to roam, like University of Colorado at Denver grad student Kyle Crawford, say that, in retrospect, the lifestyle of the characters in "On the Road" is not appealing. "I want to be in a place, and work on a career, and have a family," Mr. Crawford says, noting that, when he was a teenager, the novel inspired him to drive across the US. "To read it now, it's kind of nostalgic."
Whether or not young people ultimately pursue a conventional lifestyle, reading Kerouac helps them realize that they have a choice, Johnson says. "They can appreciate the advantages of nonconformity, even if they themselves are not willing to change."
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