On The Road
(Jack, Kerouac)
This novel gave fame to Kerouac. On the Road is the story of a friendship between Dean (alias Neal Kassidy) and Sal Paradiso (Jack Kerouac) a tie lived during the trips they made by car from the west to the east coast of USA. But it is also the book that shows at its best the changes and the contradictions of America entering the fifties, an age of consumering and conservatism. The two protagonists live on the borders of a society that does not reflect them any longer. They reject the growing hypocrisy and the lack of values of their time. Dean, who was born in a car, had grown up in a reformatory, motherless, swings from his beautiful 15 year old wife to the many mistresses. Sal is in a continous search for something he has not got, he is drunk with the jazz of Charlie Parker played in New York bar cafes. He is ravished with the beauty of the world, but also conscious of the fragility of human life. Sal is without money, always hungry, jumps on and off goods trains not to pay fare. Like a tramp, he lives in woods at night, on the edges, in contact with the poorest and the miserest. Sal is just like a little St. Francis unable to find the right place in life, his only joy is to live under a beautiful, sky full of stars, just like fireworks. He can't sleep in comfort in the woods, not because of wild animals, but for fear of policemen always ready to run after tramps and throw them into cage. This novel is a true social study of postwar America, with the catholic Massachusetts where Sal comes from, his feverishly cultured New York, the Southern States scorching with heath, the beauty of San Francisco a city which will become in the following years the capital of counter culture and freedom of America. There is desolation and protest in this book, the picture of an America that more than wealth gives birth to contrasts and differences, unable to contain and accept them.
Resumos Relacionados
- Sulla Strada
- We Live In Deeds, Not In Years.
- We Live In Deeds, Not In Years.
- Life Is Beautiful, A Window To See The World
- Love Story
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