ON THE ROAD: JACK KEROUAC’S EPIC AUTOETHNOGRAPHY

Authors

• Michael Amundsen Tallinn University

Keywords:

Kerouac, novel, ethnography, autoethnography, empathy

Abstract

Jack Kerouac’s classic mid-twentieth century novel On the Road has been noted as the decisive work of Beat Generation literature. As a roman à clef it describes in intimate detail the world of Kerouac’s friends and acquaintances and their multifarious adventures and travels in the years from 1947 to 1950 when Kerouac was a young struggling writer. His urgent prose found a receptive audience with America’s young people which has never completely waned. Beyond being a touchstone of the counterculture, On the Road is an ethnographic portrait of mid-twentieth-century America. The author’s chronicle of his social milieu and its stance towards wider American cultural is an autoethnography: reflective, personal and connected to the social trends of his times. Kerouac, by describing his own life, tells us much about his time and place in a plangent iteration of what would become a broader movement of young people seeking transcendence.