A Journey with no Destination: Anarchetypal Patterns in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road
Rezumat
Abstract: Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is one of United States’s best known travel narratives, a novel that fictionalizes key moments and characters from the 1950s and wraps them in the typical bohemian aura of the Beat generation. However, besides discussing these historical elements and Kerouac’s way of reimagining them in his work, the aim of this paper is to take the analysis even further and to examine the text from an original point of view, namely through Corin Braga’s concept of the “anarchetype”. Meant to represent the opposite of the archetype understood as a cultural imagine or as a way of perceiving the world, the anarchetype will be transposed into the terms of travel literature in order to demonstrate that On the Road is an important example of an anarchetypal pattern that reflects, on a geographical map, the vision and thinking perspectives of the postmodern subject.
Key words: anarchetype, Jack Kerouac, On the Road, journey, Beat generation, travel literature
Bibliografie
Acknowledgement: This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-1234.
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