“It Was My Dream That Screwed Up”: The Relativity of Transcendence in On the Road

Abstract

Abstract: This paper interrogates Jack Kerouac's appropriation and transformation of a Thoreauvian-style transcendentalism by reading On the Road through Mikhail Bakhtin's discussion of the chronotope. Kerouac's chronotopic resistance to dominant visions of the United States brings with it a problematic identity politics, specifically in terms of the racialization of the representation of transcendent identity. Rather than a personal or specific failure of a particular author or text, this tension can be read as a portrayal of the inevitable failure of social critiques that are based on notions of finding an “authentic” identity in a transcendence beyond, and disconnected from, historical and personal contexts. In other words, On the Road can be seen as a portrayal of the problems of an American romantic notion of identity, which makes universal claims about the transcendental potential of the individual. On the Road thus points to a difficulty surrounding dominant US notions of the self-reliance of the individual per se.