Jack Kerouac and the liberal tradition

After World War II, many writers found that the pre-war version of American liberalism was unable to explain the horrors of the war and the subsequent rise of communist hysteria; nor could it account for the failure of politics to provide solutions to those realities and for the sense of alienation that prevailed in spite of economic abundance. Therefore, the narrative of liberalism seemed in need of revision. This dissertation takes as its thesis that Kerouac's writing reveals the presence of his attempt to refashion liberalism for himself, that is, to configure the world into a form that made sense to him; through this revision, Kerouac reassesses both his relationship to America and his role as a writer. The thesis begins with a discussion of the cultural and historical conditions in which the need for a new narrative of liberalism arose and looks at several writers in whose work an older liberalism is apparent, including William Saroyan. Subsequent chapters explore Kerouac's early writing in Atop an Underwood and The Town and the City to locate the presence of that older liberalism and also the emergence of a more accurate liberal vision. The thesis also shows how On the Road provides evidence of Kerouac's changing vision; and, by discussing bebop jazz in several texts and Buddhism in The Dharma Bums and Some of the Dharma, it argues that jazz and Buddhism can be possible models by which liberalism may be revised. The final section of the thesis looks at Big Sur and examines Kerouac's role as a cultural icon; it concludes that, at the end of his life, Kerouac had come to a position from which he could understand and accept the complexity of the world and still maintain a sense of wonder.