Sals Enlightenment in Mexico in Jack Kerouacs, On the Road Essays

In A Mexico Fellaheen from Lonesome Traveler, Jack Kerouac describes crossing the confine between America and Mexico Its a great(p) face of entering the sharp Land, especi entirelyy because its so close to dry faced Arizona and Texas and all over the Southwest B but you can find it, this feeling, this fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless ga insofary of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues (22). Mexico is at once close to America and yet distinct from it, a Pure Land removed from the fallout of Spenglers crumbling Hesperian civilization. By acknowledging its primitive innocence, Kerouac calls attention to the difference between the ideal of granting immunity and pastoral harmony represented by Mexico and the reality of contemporary America. moreover more significantly, Kerouac describes later in the article the inherent contradictions of Mexico in his assure with easily-accessible drugs, corrupt police, and fumbling novice bull-fighting, he also finds a profoundly religious people, and he is able to accept them without judgement as a complex mix of good and bad. As he says in that article, I saw how everybody dies and nobodys going to care, I felt how awful it is to live only if so you can die like a bull confine in a screaming human ring (33), but he ends with the understanding that the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great inappropriate dream (36). This vision of Mexico as a Pure Land with essential contradictions and complexity also appears in Kerouacs On the Road. In the final sections, Sal and dean travel to Mexico City, but while Dean goes for kicks and to obtain a rapidly divorce, Sal goes for a different reas... ...na Baym. New York Norton, 1998. 1072-1101 & 1126-43. Hunt, Tim. Kerouacs Crooked Road Development of a Fiction. Hamden, Conn. Archon, 1981. Kerouac, Jack. Mexico Fellaheen from Lonesome Traveler. 1960. New York Grove, 1988. ---. On the Road. 1957. New York Penguin, 1991. ---. Visions of Cody. 1960. New York Penguin, 1993.Lardas, John. The Bop disclosure The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Urbana U of Illinois Press, 2001. Niebuhr, Rienhold. The Irony of American History. New York Scribners, 1952. Schaub, Thomas Hill. American Fiction in the Cold War. Madison U of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Tytell, John. The Beat coevals and the Continuing American Revolution. in Ed. Holly George-Warren. The Rolling Stone Book of the get the better of The Beat Generation and American Culture. New York Hyperion, 1999. 55-67.