The road in American literature and film Jack Kerouac's Legacy

Abstract

The road has been an enduring icon of American history and culture from the accounts of the first settlers to present-day literature, including frontier narratives. The nation was built upon social and spatial mobility: the American dream about prosperity and improvement was accompanied by the long quests for a home of natives, pilgrims, settlers, pioneers, slaves or immigrants. This mixture gave birth to a particular sense of stability and independence that has stuck to American society. In that way, the conceptions of “identity” and “self-discovery” are almost inseparable from that of “journey”, as if the ultimate internal and social voyage could only be achieved through a physical one, in Ronald Primeau‟s words: “[w]hereas most travelers of old in pilgrimages or quest romances moved with deliberation toward goals, Americans were nomadic in their trust that the power of movement itself would bring happiness, success, and fulfillment” (18). Thus, we are able to realize how the road acquires a particular sensibility in the American context, separating their idea of mobility from –especially- the Europeans‟ one, becoming a sort of foundational myth