An Analysis of
speech and structure in
Jack Kerouac's
On the Road
Table of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................3
ESSENTIALS OF SPONTANEOUS PROSE
Set-up ...................................................................................................................4-5
Procedure ..............................................................................................................5
Method ..................................................................................................................6
Scoping ..................................................................................................................6-7
ON THE ROAD
Point of View ........................................................................................................7-13
Structure of Time ..................................................................................................13-16
1.Introduction
Kerouac always laid emphasis on his style of writing. He did not want to become famous because of the content of his books but because of his way of writing. His intention was to invent something totally new, a new style, a new language to set against the traditional and old structure and language of literature. Therefore, Kerouac wrote his “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” in connection with “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”, his rules but also general “laws” for everybody how to write to get insight into new literary and formal dimensions of literature. This emphasis on new aspects of prose is, of course, Kerouac's reaction on the flop of his first novel “The Town and the City” in which he tried to imitate Thomas Wolfes' way of writing. After this traumatic experience to fail by using traditional forms of literature, he decided to create a new prose, his Modern Prose, based on the “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”. Accordingly, these essentials became a theory for a specific form of prose in American literature in the middle of the twentieth century.
Here can be made a first comparison to the Beat Generation, Kerouac was a member of (some people even say the inventor and call him “King of the Beats”). This generation also wanted to create a new way, this is a new way of living. They were tired of the traditional forms of society, of conservative rules, they felt imprisoned by following the principles and opinions of society. Beat means to be always on the move, not to have permanent relations to people or places, no responsibility, no regular work. The word “beat” has not only his origin in the verb “to beat” or in its passive form “to be beaten”, meaning to be out and tired of the existing society, but also in nouns like “beatitude” or “beatification”, which gives this generation a somehow religious character and shows the peoples' feelings to have found a new aim, a new way of living: to move.
Fact is that they did not want to destroy society but simply did not feel as a part of it. Therefore, they founded their own society, a new/modern one with several ways to express themselves, where also minorities (such as hobos, whores and homosexualists) were included. One way to express their feelings was to write. Kerouac's prose was seen as a symbol for the new generation, spontaneous, new, modern, flowing, its structure and language reproducing the atmosphere and attitude of the whole Beat Generation.
As the “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” are so important, as I have said, not “only” for the history of literature but also for Kerouac himself that he wanted his texts be regarded as a realisation of his essentials, we have to look on them first before examining the structure and language of Kerouac's prose. Later on we will see in how far Kerouac followed his own rules and if his book “On the Road” is really written in “Spontaneous Prose”.
2. Essentials of Spontaneous Prose
For his “Spontaneous Prose” Kerouac developed nine means to translate it into action:
set up
procedure
method
scoping
5) lag in procedure
timing
centre of interest
structure of work
mental state
As for my later following analysis of language in Jack Kerouac's “On the Road” only the first four essentials are of real importance, I will shortly describe them now without going into the other five essentials, although (this has to be said) they are as much important for Kerouac's style of writing in general as the other four ones.
Set-up
In Kerouac's first essential he describes how the object has to be translated into words by the author. This literary reproduction must have, so he says, the form of a sketching, meaning an undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea-words. As a consequence, the author must not reflect on anything between the reception and the production of an object. He has to write down immediately what comes to his mind. Thus, Kerouac demands for a high grade of spontaneity as the title already says: “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”. Spontaneity is a very important means in writing (for Kerouac), combined with the use of language of common speech. This was also the intention of the Beat Generation to protest against the traditional and for them mostly artificial way of writing. They wanted a flow of words showing the spontaneous thoughts of the common people and not the stylised literature thinking over every word twice if it really is the “proper word”. According to the Beat Generation, Kerouac says that there is no time “to think of a proper word but the infantile pileup of scatolagical buildup words till satisfaction is gained”. In a letter to Allen Ginsberg he
describes this process even like having a vision:
(...) everything activates in front of you in myriad profusion,
you just have to purify your mind and let it pour the words
(which effortless angels of the vision fly when you stand in
front of reality) and write with 100% personal honesty both
physic and social etc. And slap it all down (...) until sometimes
I got so inspired I lost consciousness I was writing (...) It's
the only way to write.
Here you can see how serious Kerouac took his task to create a new form of literature. His “Spontaneous Prose” was, thus, not only a reaction on Kerouac's first failure or on the “dated” traditional forms of language but a high engagement or even an obsession to find his own style.
A great help for him in this case was also the abuse of drugs to get himself into the described mental state, at the same time another way of the Beat Generation (next to writing) to express themselves and their feelings.
Procedure
Also with the second essential Kerouac wants to stress the spontaneity an author must have especially while writing a text. As I have already said above, Kerouac demands to eliminate every kind of reflection between the thought itself and its literary production on the paper because otherwise there would be a disturbance. Therefore, to think (something over) means automatically that the author loses the sense for reality and individuality of the object. According to Kerouac, there is “no time for poetry but exactly what is”. Speech (not language!) should be simple and “pure”, representing the common people talking with each other. The demand for “purity of speech” and “sketching language” reminds of some essentials of Ernest Hemingway where he says: “Books should be written about the people you know (...)” and where his intention can be seen to “(...) put down what I see and what I feel (...) to strip language clear, to lay it down to the bone.”
Both, Hemingway and Kerouac, are convinced that this way of writing, which possesses a “confession-character”, reveals the true thoughts and ideas of an author that would otherwise not be realised at all.
Method
In this third essential Kerouac explains the difference between language and speech which is written language (=language) on the one and spoken language (=speech) on the other side. For Kerouac, speech and Modern Prose are actually synonyms. Speech is connected with speed that means spontaneity and goes back to the first and the second essential where he says that there must not be any reflection or disturbance (which is the same for him) during the act of writing. His opinion is to leave out anything that could make his structure and speech appearing somehow crafted, meaning composed and artificial. The consequence is that every full-stop, every colon does not belong to the text because the reader should get the impression of a real conversation and colons are only “interrupting” the flow of words. Spoken language consists of pauses and rhythms, whereas written language is characterised by punctuation marks. Speech, for Kerouac, is therefore very similar to the jazz-music, a third way (next to writing and drugs) for the Beat Generation to show their feelings. Music, and especially jazz, is based on rhythms, patterns and pauses. A jazz-trumpeter extemporises all the time, not able to think but only to play and - breathe. And exactly these breath units are the main element of speech. In this case does a space dash in “spoken language” (nevertheless written as a text) substitute a full-stop in written (“composed”) language. Punctuation is a restriction that should be ignored. Correspondingly, Kerouac says in his “Belief & Technique for Modern Prose”: “Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition (...)”. The only “interruption” or structural element in Spontaneous Prose consists of the author's breath. So Kerouac:
(...) jazz and bop, in the sense of a, say, a tenor man
drawing a breath and blowing a phrase on his saxophone,
till he runs out of breath, and when he does, his sentence,
his statement's been made (...) that's how I therefore separate
my sentences, as breath seperations of the mind (...) I
formulated the theory of breath as measure, in prose
and verse, (...)
2.4.Scoping
This fourth (and in my description the last) essential is like a consequence of the other three. If there is no time to reflect on what you write, no time to find the “proper word”, there cannot be a “selectivity of expression” either. The result is a “free deviation (association) of mind into limitless blow-on-subject seas of thought”. The only means, Kerouac's Spontaneous Prose is ruled by, is, as I have already said, the discipline of rhythms and rhetorical exhalation:
(...), swimming in sea of English with no discipline other
than rhythms and rhetorical exhalation and expostulated
statement, like a fist coming down on a table with each
complete utterance, bang! (the space dash) - Blow as deep
as you want - write as deeply, fish as far down as you want,
satisfy yourself first, then reader cannot fail to receive telepathic
shock and meaning-excitement by same laws operating in
his own human mind.
Here one can see that Kerouac is always thinking of the effect on the reader, too. He sees this one as a partner, talks to him and wants him to get involved in the story. We will see later how Kerouac manages this communication between reader and writer.
On the Road
Point of View
Regarding the point of view in “On the Road”, it is obviously that first-person-narration is used which can already be seen at the beginning of the book: “I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.” The “I” is used two times, the word “Dean” only once, but at a very important place so that the reader gets to know the two main characters and can suppose their importance in the book already in the first sentence. This impression proves to be right in the third sentence when the narrator gives more information which is the full name of Dean: Dean Moriarty. He definitely seems to be very important for the narrator. This one already shows in the second sentence that the reader depends on him and his point of view as he says: “(...) I won't bother to talk about, (...)”. This kind of relationship between the reader and the narrator, who dominates the scene, can be seen during the whole book. Another aspect of the first-person-narration occurs at the end of the first paragraph, where the narrator says: “This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today (...)” This shows that the story has two different time levels: this is all far back is based on the memories of the narrator, whereas today shows the point of time when he tells the story. As a consequence, past tense is used, if the author refers to former feelings and deeds, and the story is told in the present when he narrates while things are happening. Therefore, this first-person-narration can be compared to the following characterisation given by Franz K. Stanzel:
In quasi-autobiographischen Ich-Romanen, in welchen
der Ich-Erzähler den Mittelpunkt der Geschichte bildet,
ist es die Spannung zwischen dem erlebenden Ich und
dem erzählenden Ich, die das Sinngefüge des Romans
bestimmt.
And that “On the Road” is an autobiography can easily be seen by comparing the book with Kerouac´s real life. Then, one has to come to the conclusion that Sal Paradise, the protagonist, is Jack Kerouac and Dean Moriarty, the antagonist, is Neal Cassidy (Kerouac's friend). This shows how small the distance is between the author (Jack Kerouac) and the narrator (Sal Paradise).
I have already said that the narrator is able to dominate the scene by telling the reader only what he thinks to be important, creating a subjective point of view. With this method, the narrator becomes a real person for the reader, stressed by the fact that he also directly addresses this one by using rhetorical questions as for example: “Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof ?” or “Can you picture me walking those last miles through the Lincoln Tunnel or over the Washington Bridge and into New Jersey ?”. Another kind of communication with the reader is used if the events or the narrator's impressions intend to be very descriptive:
If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious
source in the Andirondacks, think of all the places it
journeys by as it goes out to sea forever - think of that
wonderful Hudson Valley.
It is clearly to be seen that this close relationship to the reader supports this one's imagination. The reader is able to feel as a part of the story, acting and experiencing with the narrator. Also the
imperative “think” contributes to this atmosphere. A third kind of addressing the reader can always be realised when the narrator gives any explanations about characters or places or simply why he tells certain things. An example for the last aspect is: “The reason I'm going into everything that happened in San Fran is because it ties up with everything else all the way down the line.” This kind of explanation, which Gabriele Spengemann calls an aside, shows again how dominant the narrator is. He decides what to tell, when and why. This further aspect of the point of view, which Kerouac uses in “On the Road”, is called authorial narration. The narrator does not only give a subjective and personal point of view by addressing the reader as a participant, but also thinks and reflect on the events and his own role. For example: “Meanwhile Dean had gotten a job in a parking lot, had a fight with Marylou in their Hoboken apartment - God knows why they went there - (...), where Sal Paradise comments on what happened afterwards, that means at the point of time he tells the story. The reader consequently gets the impression of a very independent narrator, a narrating but also experiencing person who takes part in the story and interprets it, too. These comments are not only separated from the narrated text referring to the content, but also formally by using a space dash:
(...) the truck bounced and teetered from one side of
the road to the other - miraculously only when there
were no cars coming the opposite way - and I thought (...)
Here it is clearly to be seen that there is a change between the experiencing narrator (at the beginning and at the end) and the narrating one (“... miraculously only...”) within the sentence. Another time, Kerouac stresses these reflections of the narrator at the time of narration by using the present instead of the past: “`What gloom' cried the baritone, rising out of the dungeon under a groaning stone. I cried for it. That's how I see life, too.” The use of the present has the effect of a general expression which stands out against the narrated text. The same effect is obtained when Sal Paradise thinks about love:
I wanted to go and get Rita again and tell her a lot more
things, and really make love to her this time, and calm
her fears about men. Boys and girls in America have
such a sad time together; sophistication demands that
they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary
talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for
life is holy and every moment is precious. I heard the Denver
and Rio Grande locomotive howling off to the mountains.
Another famous passage standing in the present tense reflects not only the opinion of the narrator, but also of Jack Kerouac himself as it can be identified with a description of the Beat Generation:
(...) they danced down the streets like dingledodies,
and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life
after people who interest me, because the only people
for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,
mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the
same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace
thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman
candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the
middle you see the blue centrelight pop and everybody
goes ´Awww!`
At this place it is shown again how close author and narrator are. One could suppose that they are sometimes the same person.
Next to reflections of the narrating “I”, there can also be found thoughts of the experiencing one, which are mostly introduced with verbs like “I realised”, “I knew”, “I've never understood why” or simply “I thought”. These passages do not show what the narrator does, but what he thinks, which is another chance for the reader to get to know him better and to accept him as a real person. An example for this aspect of authorial narration is:
I wished I were Joe. I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad,
strolling in this violet dark, this unbearable sweet night,
wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, truehearted,
ecstatic Negroes of America. The raggedy neighbourhoods
reminded me of Dean and Marylou, who knew these streets
so well from childhood. How I wished I could find them.
These thoughts of the narrator alternates with the narrated events during the whole book. Action and reflection follows one after another in small distances as it can be seen in the following passage:
action reflection
I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.
I lugged watermelon crates over the
ice floor of reefers into the blazing sun.
In God's name and under the stars, what for?
The authorial narration as a part of the point of view in “On the Road” is only interrupted when the narrator pretends not to know the facts and, thus, supposes something, for example: “I think he was running away from something in New York (...)” or “For a minute I thought Eddie was trying to get away with the car - and for all I know that's what he meant to do”. Nevertheless, it is obvious that the narrator has the power over the story and the reader. In addition, it can be seen that he even has an omniscient point of view and is only pretending not to know motives or feelings of the other characters, because he exactly describes these ones in sentences like: “Gene was taking care of him, of his moods and fears.” or “And one of them made eyes at Blondey and he never saw it, and if he had he wouldn't have cared (...)”. This kind of authorial narration is described by Franz K. Stanzel in the following way:
So übernimmt der Ich-Erzähler vom auktorialen Erzähler
ein Ordnung und Wert stiftendes Vermögen, das häufig
über die zu erwartenden Fähigkeiten und Anlagen der
Ich-Figur hinausgeht, besonders auffällig dort, wo im
erlebenden Ich nicht einmal Keime oder Ansätze dafür zu
entdecken sind. Solche Ich-Erzähler zehren von einer ihnen
fremden Geistigkeit, hinter welcher meist ganz unverkennbar
der Autor selbst steht.
Fact is that there is always a change between action and reflection, between the experiencing and the narrating “I”. This has again consequences on the structure of “On the Road”. Scenic presentation exists next to reportorial narration. Sometimes, Sal Paradise is situated in the centre of the story, a little bit later he reports from a peripheral point of view. If scenic presentation is used, which can be seen by direct speech or the interior monologue, the distance between the narrator and the reader almost disappears. An example for the interior monologue is the following:
I picked up my bag and got on, and who should be sitting there
alone but the Mexican girl. I dropped right opposite her and began
scheming right off. I was so lonely, so sad, so tired, so quivering,
so broken, so beat, that I got up my courage necessary to approach
a strange girl, and acted. Even then I spent five minutes beating
my thighs in the dark as the bus rolled down the road.
Your gotta, you gotta or you'll die! Damn fool, talk to her! What's
wrong with you? Aren't you tired enough of yourself by now? And
before I knew what I was doing, I leaned across the aisle to her
(she was trying to sleep on the seat) and said, `Miss, would you like
to use my raincoat for a pillow?'
It is very hard to find examples, where only scenic presentation is used, because the narrator always “interrupts” by giving his opinion or certain information like “and who should be sitting there alone but the Mexican girl” or “she was trying to sleep on the seat”. But nevertheless, the narrow distance between the reader and the experiencing “I” gives the impression that the first one participates in the story, that he is present. It is different when Sal Paradise takes the role as the narrating first person. Then, he guides, comments and interprets the story by giving information about time and place, explanations and judgements. These information about place and time are for example: “I drove through South Carolina and beyond Macon, Georgia, as Dean, Marylou, and Ed slept.”and “(...) riding (...) down along, down along, by Memphis, Greenville, Eudora, Vicksburg, Natchez, Port Allen, and Port Orleans and Port of the Deltas, by Potash, Venice, and the Night's Great Gulf, and out.”or “In the month of July 1947 (...)” and “It was over a year (...)”, which gives of course the reader a chance to comprehend the trips of Sal and Dean. As a consequence, the distance between reader and narrator grows, because these information only have the function to summarize the events and to push forward the action.
Franz K. Stanzel explains the difference between scenic and reportorial narration as follows:
Anwesenheit des Autors bedeutet, daß der Erzähler und
der Erzählvorgang zusammen mit der erzählten Handlung
im Vorstellungsbild des Lesers konkretisiert werden. In diesem
Fall herrscht in der Regel berichtende Erzählweise vor. Bei
vorherrschend szenischer Erzählweise wird dagegen das Bild
des Erzählers nicht in der Vorstellung des Lesers aufgerufen.
Next to the information about place and time, there are also other reasons (as I have already said), why the existence of the narrator is so obvious for the reader in reportorial narration. These are for example explanations given during the direct speech of another character:
“You should have been here about two months ago when me
and Slegde” (that was another cop, a youngster who wanted to
be a Texas Ranger and had to be satisfied with his present
lot) “arrested a drunk in Barrack G. Boy, you should have seen
the blood fly.”
or judgements as in the following passages: “We didn't understand the question, and it was a damned good one.” and “`Say, ain't this a nice day?' And it sure was.”
I have said above that these comments have the effect that the distance between reader and narrator (the narrating one in this case) grows, but more important is that they have the effect of spontaneity. The narrator is permanently switching between experiencing and narrating first person, which causes a high tension, and every time he has something on his mind, he immediately tells the reader his thoughts. The consequence are the comments and explanations. This shows how deeply involved he is in everything that happens. Based on this fact, one can say that Kerouac really observed his first essential, the spontaneous sketching from memory of a definite image-object. That, however, does not mean that Kerouac's “On the Road” only consists of associations. On the contrary, Kerouac's shifts away, Gabriele Spengemann calls them digressions, from the narrative line are only small ones.
Structure of Time
We can say now that “On the Road” is written in first-person-narration with a narrator who switches between an experiencing and a narrating one to give the reader any information he needs and to communicate with him so that the reader has the impression he takes part in the story. As a consequence, we have two different time-levels: the remembered time and the time, when the narrator is remembering. The remembered time, the past, reaches from July 1947 up to the end of 1950, which can be proved by the information about time I mentioned in the chapter “Point of View” (2.1.). We do not know, however, the exact point of time when the narration takes place (which is of course in the present tense). Nevertheless, there are sentences like: “This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today (...)”, which show the great distance between these two time-levels. Thus, the narrator tells the story from a (high) temporal distance. This situation describes Carole G. Vopat:
(...) Kerouac equips his narrator with a double vision, enabling
Sal to comment on the people and events of the novel as he saw
them when they happened, and as he views them now that they
are over.
A last information about the point of time, when the narrator tells the story is given in the last paragraph of the whole book. Here, one gets the impression that the remembered time and the time, when the narrator remembers, becomes one. He says good-bye to Dean Moriarty (actually the “remembered time”) on the one hand and thinks about America and his citizens on the other. A reason for this impression is certainly the tense, Kerouac uses in this passage: the present - and not the past! So this last paragraph seems to be a summing-up of the whole story:
So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down
river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all
that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West
Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity
of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land
where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't
you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and
shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming
of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks
and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to
happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of
Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never
found, I think of Dean Moriarty.
Another aspect of temporal structure, Kerouac uses, is the leaving out of time periods. This is most clearly to be seen between the first and the second, the second and the third and the third and the
fourth part. “On the Road” is actually divided into five parts, but the fifth belongs to the fourth part as an epilogue, referring to content and structure (see Gabriele Spengemann). The beginning of each part (except of the first and the fifth) is as follows: Part II: “It was over a year before I saw Dean again.”, part III: “In the spring of 1949 (...)” and part IV: “(...) Whenever spring comes to New York (...)”. One can see that Kerouac leaves out up to one year to push forward the action. A further aspect of time-structure builds a contrast to these “leaving outs”, the digressions. These are passages consisting of personal reflections of the narrator, characterisations or asides (I gave a definition at the beginning of my essay), which are mostly written in brackets. They have the characteristic that in this case the event took a shorter period of time than its literary production. An example for these digressions is:
I promised myself to go the same way when spring really
bloomed and opened up the land.
And this was really the way that my whole road experience
began, and the things that were to come are too fantastic
not to tell.
One can see that the narrating “I” takes the place of the experiencing one with the beginning of “And this (...)”, which interrupts the flow of time. This interruption builds, together with flashbacks and predictions in “On the Road”, the only exception for the absolutely chronological narration. Jack Kerouac's “On the Road” is based on the story, that means a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence and chronological order. A plot, which is a narrative of events with the emphasis falling on causality and causal relationships, cannot be found. This thesis can be proved by lots of information of place and time that I gave at the beginning of this chapter (2.2). As an example for the predictions, which also stop the flow of time for a moment (as I have mentioned above), can go the following one:
Although my aunt warned me that he would get me in
trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon,
and believe it at my young age; and a little bit of trouble or
even Dean's eventual rejection of me as a buddy, putting
me down, as he would later, on starving sidewalks and sickbeds -
what did it matter?
Here, in the first part, the narrator talks of two events which take place in the second and in the fourth. Part II:
Suddenly Dean was saying good-bye. He was bursting to
see Camille and find out what had happened. Marylou and I
stood dumbly in the street and watched him drive away.
`You see what a bastard he is?' said Marylou. `Dean will
leave you out in the cold any time it's in his interest.´
Part IV:
Then I got fever and became delirious and unconscious.
(...) And I saw Dean bending over the kitchen table. It
was several nights later and he was leaving Mexico City
already (...)
Regarding the temporal structure in “On the Road” as a whole, it is striking that the text is very organised and seems to be rather “crafted” although Kerouac actually wanted it to be the contrary: spontaneous with a flow of words and many associations as he says in his nine essentials. As a consequence, we can say that Kerouac did not quite follow his own rules, at least referring to the structure of the book, which is dominated by the story (not the plot) and the resulting time-structure. His “Spontaneous Prose” therefore mainly shows in the difference of language and speech, which I explained in the first part of my essay. Kerouac uses a form of speech which can be compared to an oral communication. He does not only use the structure of spoken language (see 2.3.), but also the vocabulary. Speech in “On the Road” is characterised by many superlatives, expressions like “absolute(ly)”, “tremendous(ly)” or “really” and lots of comparatives up to total exaggerations as for example:
His daughters watched in the rain. The prettiest, shyest one hid
far back in the field to watch and she had good reason because she
was absolutely and finally the most beautiful girl Dean and I ever
saw in all our lives. She was about sixteen, and had Plains complexion
like wild roses, and the bluest eyes, the most lovely hair, and the
modesty and quickness of a wild antilope.
One can say that this kind of writing is the only way to translate the spontaneity of action into speech, which means as a consequence that “On the Road” is a combination of more “traditional” structure and a new kind of speech in the sense of Kerouac's “Spontaneous Prose”.
Bibliography
Abrams, M. H.: Glossary of Literary Terms. New York: Holt & Rinehart, 1957
Hart, James D.: Oxford Companion to American Literature. London:
Oxford UP, 1955
Hemingway, Ernest: “Old Newsman Writes”, Esquire Vol. 2. December, 1934
Kerouac, Jack: On the Road. New York: Penguin Books, 1991
Kerouac, Jack: “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose”, A Casebook on the Beat. New York: ed. Thomas Parkinson, Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1961
Kerouac, Jack: “Belief and Technique for Modern Prose”, A Casebook on the Beat.
New York: ed. Thomas Parkinson, Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1961
Kerouac, Jack: A letter to Allen Ginsberg. New York: Special Manuscript Collection Ginsberg - Columbia University Libraries, 18.05.1952
Spengemann, Gabriele: Jack Kerouac: Spontaneous Prose. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Praxis der Textgestaltung von “On the Road” und “Visions of Cody”.
Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Peter D. Lang GmbH, 1980
Stanzel, Franz K.: Typische Formen des Romans. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1964
Stanzel, Franz K.: “Die Erzählsituation und das Epische Präteritum”. Zur Poetik des
Romans, ed. Volker Klotz. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 1965: 303-338
Vopat, Carole Gottlieb: “Jack Kerouac´s On the Road: A Reevaluation”.
Midwest Quarterly. No 14: 1972/73: 385-407
Jack Kerouac, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose. A Casebook on the Beat.( New York: ed. Thomas Parkinson,
Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1961) 66
A letter to Allen Ginsberg.(New York: Special Manuscript Collection - Columbia University Libraries, 18.05.1952) 1
Jack Kerouac, Belief and Technique for Modern Prose. A Casebook on the Beat.( New York: ed. Thomas Parkinson,
Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1961) 67
Ernest Hemingway, Old Newsman Writes. Esquire, Vol. 2 (December, 1934) 25-26
Jack Kerouac, Belief and Technique for Modern Prose 67
The Art of Fiction, XLI, “ Jack Kerouac”- Interview. (The Paris Interview, XI, No. 43, 1968) 83
Jack Kerouac, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose 66
Jack Kerouac, Essentials of Spontaneous Prose 66
Jack Kerouac. On the Road (New York: Penguin Books, 1991) 3
Kerouac, On the Road 3
Kerouac, On the Road 4
Franz K. Stanzel, Typische Formen des Romans (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1964) 31
Kerouac, On the Road 105
Kerouac, On the Road 106
Kerouac, On the Road 12
Kerouac, On the Road 60
Kerouac, On the Road 9
Kerouac, On the Road 27
Kerouac, On the Road 52
Kerouac, On the Road 57
Kerouac, On the Road 8
Kerouac, On the Road 180
Kerouac, On the Road 101
Kerouac, On the Road 179-80
Kerouac, On the Road 18
Kerouac, On the Road 20
Kerouac, On the Road 30
Kerouac, On the Road 32
Franz K. Stanzel, Typische Formen des Romans 37
Kerouac, On the Road 81
Kerouac, On the Road 138
Kerouac, On the Road 156
Kerouac, On the Road 11
Kerouac, On the Road 109
Franz K. Stanzel, Die Erzählsituation und das epische Präteritum. Zur Poetik des Romans (Darmstadt: ed.
V. Klotz, 1965) 304
Kerouac, On the Road 66
Kerouac, On the Road 22
Kerouac, On the Road 151
Kerouac, On the Road 4
Carole G. Vopat, Jack Kerouac's On the Road: A Reevaluation. (Midwest Quaterly, No. 14, 1972/73) 392
Kerouac, On the Road 309-310
Kerouac, On the Road 109
Kerouac, On the Road 179
Kerouac, On the Road 249
Kerouac, On the Road 9
Kerouac, On the Road 11
Kerouac, On the Road 170
Kerouac, On the Road 302
Kerouac, On the Road 226-27
2