“All We Do Is Drive” The Promise of American Mobility in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road

267648 Ekaterina Andreeva

Pro Gradu Thesis English Language and Culture

School of Humanities Philosophical Faculty

University of Eastern Finland June 2016

ITÄ-SUOMEN YLIOPISTO – UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND

Tiedekunta – Faculty Philosophical Faculty

Osasto – School School of Humanities

Tekijät – Author Ekaterina Andreeva Työn nimi – Title “All We Do Is Drive”: The Promise of American Mobility in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Pääaine – Main subject Työn laji – Level Päivämäärä –

Date Sivumäärä – Number of pages

English Language and Culture Pro gradu -tutkielma x 15.06.2016 81 Sivuainetutkielma Kandidaatin tutkielma Aineopintojen tutkielma

Tiivistelmä – Abstract The thesis examines two novels, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and On the Road by Jack Kerouac, from the perspective of the road novel. The aim of the thesis is to demonstrate the importance of the elements of mobility such as the road and the car as mechanisms of engaging with the movement towards desired goals, such as the American Dream and reaching the American West. Forced to leave behind their home in Oklahoma, the Joad family of The Grapes of Wrath is set out on the road towards the West in order to reach prosperous California and to settle down there. The characters of On the Road with its protagonist Sal also set out on the road but in their case in search of freedom that the road travelling holds. The theoretical background of this study consists of theories of travel writing, American mobility and automobility, and the culture of the American road. The main focus is mobility, the experience of travelling across America and, its influence on American identity. Other main theoretical concepts of this study include travel fiction and the notion of the American Dream. These are the main concepts, which provide the theoretical background for the analysis of The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road. The thesis, starts with an introduction. The following theoretical section is divided into five subsections, where I present the concepts crucial to my analysis in more detail. The analysis section of the thesis discusses the novel using the concepts mentioned in the theoretical part. The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road were analyzed in terms of the concepts mentioned above. The analysis showed that both novels could be equally read as road novels, possessing many similar characteristics that are intrinsic to American road novels, such as the authentic travelling experience provided by Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck. In addition, elements of mobility that serve as mechanisms of movement also can be found in both novels. Furthermore, the motivation behind the movement in both novels is represented by a variety of expression of the American Dream that lead the characters of both novels to the West – that is California. In addition, both novels also explore the positive and negative sides of the road. The final section of the thesis presents the conclusions of the study. Avainsanat – Keywords Travel Writing, travel fiction, American road, mobility, American Dream, John Steinbeck, Jack Kerouac, The Grapes of Wrath, On the Road

Contents

1. Introduction.................................................................................................................................................1

2. Theoretical Framework............................................................................................................................5

2.1. Fluidity of Travel Writing..............................................................................................................5

2.2. Travel Fiction as a Category of Travel Writing....................................................................11

2.3. Twentieth-Century Travel Writing, Car Culture, (Auto)mobility, and Identity........15

2.4. The Culture of American Road..................................................................................................24

2.5. The American Dream....................................................................................................................30

3. Analysis of The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road....................................................................33

3.1. Introducing the Novels: Behind the Creative Process of John Steinbeck and Jack

Kerouac’s Novels....................................................................................................................................33

3.2. Mobility and Its Elements............................................................................................................41

3.3. Versions of the American Dream in The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road............59

3.4. The West............................................................................................................................................66

4. Conclusion.................................................................................................................................................75

Bibliography...................................................................................................................................................79

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1. Introduction

The aim of this thesis is to provide a reading of two novels, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

written by the American novelist John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957),

as American road novels. In other words, I will study the novels from the perspective of

the travel writing genre and try to narrow down the category within travel writing as the

genre itself is extremely broad. While reading Steinbeck’s novel, I became interested in the

“moving” theme of The Grapes of Wrath: not only the novel presents itself as an epic

human drama of American 1930s but it also takes the reader on a journey that explores the

movement of thousands of men and women as exemplified in the story of the Joads, a farm

family. The undeniable feel of the road taken by this fictional family, and also by an entire

American nation in reality, reminded me of another famous and intrinsically American

novel, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, which is written in the same “moving” manner and

also follows the road, but this time, it is the road of wanderers. In addition, the stories and

characters of both novels which race towards their respectful goals led me to believe that

the novels have a lot in common, which made me decide to examine the novels together.

Studying them synchronically will reinforce the idea that The Grapes of Wrath and On the

Road belong to the genre of travel writing, specifically to road novels.

The stories and events of the novels revolve around the characters leaving their

homes and travelling to their desired destinations using the automobile. In The Grapes of

Wrath, the Joad family’s move is forced as the land on which their family had spent so

many years living does not belong to them anymore. In On the Road, the main character

Sal Paradise is not forced to leave by faceless bank force but rather out of his free will, as

the desire to leave home with its constraints forces him to get on the road too. As a part of

my initial research I applied a search strategy using the “Google Web Search” to examine

whether both novels have been seen to fall under the category of travel writing (travel

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book) and whether they are seen as such by the audience that wishes to immerse oneself in

the travelling experience of the author and/or his or her fictional characters. As predicted,

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road surfaced as the first or second suggestion when searching for

books about travelling. However, despite the prominence of the road and moving across

America in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the book did not appear as a travel

book suggestion. What is interesting is that it means that The Grapes of Wrath is rarely

seen as a book about characters crossing American land, thus travelling from point A to B,

despite the presence of the elements of mobility like the road, the car and meeting

strangers thus travelling being in the foreground of the novel.

Undoubtedly, several critics and scholars have discussed The Grapes of Wrath

possessing many qualities, and the road novel is one of them, as in the case with Robert

DeMott who wrote the introduction for The Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics edition of

The Grapes of Wrath (x). However, a regular reader or an algorithm that web search

engines use does not include The Grapes of Wrath as a possible suggestion. The reasons

may vary: the choice of not adding the novel to the travel book category may have to do

with its title that is connected to the act of moving as in Kerouac’s On the Road when the

element of mobility is present in the title. An additional example, Steinbeck’s Travels with

Charley, which also possesses an element of moving in its title, is featured in the suggested

for reading travel books field in “Google Web Search”. The next possible explanation for

the exclusion of The Grapes of Wrath is that the novel is mainly associated with the

economic depression of the 1930s, which may influence the choice of not researching the

contents of the novel or overlooking summaries of the book, which usually include the

descriptions of the act of movement. Lastly, the reason of exclusion may depend on the

definition or understanding of what “to travel” means. To travel is to explore or to make a

journey, but, usually, people connect the word “travel” with a positive connotation,

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projecting the idea that travelling is supposed to be fun, adventurous and entertaining, and

the final destination of the journey to be fulfilling. Considering the fact that On the Road

does not necessarily portray a happy ending for its characters or there are as many readings

as there are readers and the understanding may vary from person to person, there is not a

reason why The Grapes of Wrath cannot rightfully stand alongside a well-pronounced road

novel like On the Road.

Already at an early stage in both novels the excitement of the future possibilities and

travelling the road in order to reach the desired places disappears as the characters begin to

realise how elusive the dream is – the pursuit of happiness starts with a bumpy road from

the very beginning. The road towards the Promised Land, that is, broadly, the American

West in both novels, fails its wayfarers from the start offering obstacles in the form of

inability to reach the desired goals mixed with the realisation that the constraints that the

characters are running from turn out to be a hidden or original destination all along. The

characters of both stories cannot help but look back on what they had before setting out on

the American road.

Thus, in my thesis I try to determine the similarities between Steinbeck’s The Grapes

of Wrath and Kerouac’s On the Road in order to demonstrate how relatable and relevant

both experiences of exploration are to the genre of travel writing and especially a road

novel. Furthermore, I will also argue that the similarities between the selected novels will

allow placing The Grapes of Wrath within the genre of travel writing alongside On the

Road. Thus in my analysis I want to demonstrate such strategies in the novels that will help

to strengthen the argument that the chosen stories can be read from the perspective of the

road narrative. In other words, my aim is to provide a cohesive analysis of The Grapes of

Wrath and On the Road as road novels and explore the motivation behind the movement,

they represent.

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First in this thesis, after the introduction, I am going to present my theoretical

framework in greater detail. I will first discuss the genre of travel writing and specifically

travel fiction, where I discuss the fusion of the authors’ authentic travelling experience and

fictional characters. This will be followed with an examination of twentieth-century travel

writing and mobility in the form of car travel and its relevance to Americans and their

identity. The final part of the theoretical section will cover the culture of American road.

After that I am going to analyse the novels with respect to the theoretical concepts

presented. Lastly, the thesis will close with a concluding chapter.

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2. Theoretical Framework

My aim is to provide a comparative reading of The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road as

equal travel books and more specifically road novels. The aim of the thesis is to determine

whether On the Road and The Grapes of Wrath also can be studied critically as road

novels. I have chosen to discuss the elements of American mobility such as the road, the

American Dream, and American identity in order to provide connective elements that

become apparent while reading the novels.

In this section, I will present the theoretical framework that will be applied to John

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road later in my analysis.

First, I will discuss the genre of travel writing and its boundaries and argue that the both

novels belong to the genre. After presenting the travel writing genre, I will introduce a

particular category of travel writing, travel fiction, and discuss the relationship of the

novels The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road to this sub-genre as examples of balancing

actual travelling accounts with fictional worlds. Then, I will discuss a particular feature of

twentieth- century travel writing, specifically car travelling, which is prominent in both

novels, because of the perspective of mobility that automobiles offer and its importance to

American identity. In the two final parts of this theoretical section, I will look at the

phenomenon of travelling the road as an intrinsically American expression of freedom and

examine the force behind the movement, the American Dream, before moving onto the

analysis section of this thesis.

2.1. Fluidity of Travel Writing

Travel writing (travel literature) is a popular literary genre, which is constantly being

rediscovered. The popularity of the genre as a whole has been growing in recent times, as

modern technology has allowed the broadening of the opportunities of the travel

experience, and both modern writers and readers have rediscovered the appeal of the genre.

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To this day the travelling experience often remains a luxury that not everyone can afford,

thus its literary form often becomes an attainable option that allows readers to experience

inaccessible corners of the world. Undoubtedly, travel had been present in lives of people

since before the means of travel have become available. However, with time, types of

travel accounts have become diverse and the variety of travel stories offered is endless.

Consequently, the genre of travel writing has become a special genre in respect of its

definition.

Literary scholars have dedicated many studies to this broad genre of literature

suggesting different definitions but they do not forget to mention that the genre is

extremely layered and that to provide a definition one must be as specific as one can with

their examples. Percy G. Adams concludes that the literature of travel is enormous and has

too many forms and faces to be defined (281). To put it shortly, travel writing consists of

contributions to different fields such as anthropology, psychology, history, geography, and

sociology. Authors have pursued different agendas and attempted to write about various

forms of movement. They may focus on exploration, descriptions of nature, and the

surrounding environment; others write about adventurous trips or migrants, people who

flee from unhealthy climates and problems with law, romantic heartaches, and family

problems. Moreover, the exploration may not only involve physical surroundings that one

encounters while travelling; exploration of self and description of feelings one may

experience while travelling is also a form of movement, as it concerns a physical and a

psychological journey. Movement through space incorporates everything mentioned above

and perhaps could be a reductive definition of travel literature which of course generates a

new layer of questions. Carl Thompson in his book Travel Writing sums up a set of

questions that should be considered in critical studies of travel literature: “Are all form of

movements through space really to be regarded as travel? According to what criteria, does

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that label become appropriate?” (Thompson 9-10). As Patrick Holland and Graham

Huggan (in the manner of Percy G. Adams before), who have surveyed travel writing in

the late twentieth century, point out, “the form can embrace everything ‘from picaresque

adventure to philosophical treatise, political commentary, ecological parable, and spiritual

quest’ whilst simultaneously borrow[ing] freely from history, geography, anthropology and

social science’” (qtd in Thompson 11-12). The result, they suggest, is a “hybrid genre that

straddles categories and disciplines” (qtd in Thompson 11-12).

This suggests that the boundaries of travel writing are blurry because inevitably any

sort of description or narration of movement is going to be connected to another genre like

autobiography, report, nature writing, and fiction. Youngs mentions that Peter Hulme

believes that an exclusive definition of travel writing is required as “there is almost no

statuesque literature” (3), and as noted by Casey Blanton, “the journey pattern is one of the

most persistent forms of all narratives” (qtd in Youngs 3). Hulme suggests that for a text to

be considered as travel writing, their authors must have travelled to the places they have

described (Youngs 3). Undoubtedly, the question of relevance, importance, and how the

genre differs from others is still pending due to the difficulty of providing a grounding

definition. Yet, it appears peculiar that the indefinite notion of travel writing is able to

present itself to the reader almost as clear-cut. Perhaps the genre does not seek to be

defined but the feelings that the reader experiences while following somebody’s journey

may help to explain and define the distinct qualities of travel writing. Thompson mentions

the prestigious British literary journal Granta that has considered travel writing as “a genre

especially reflective of, and responsive to, the modern condition” (Thompson 2). For a

while, he claims, the humankind has been experiencing globalization, “in which mobility,

travel and cross-cultural contacts are facts of life and an every day reality” (Thompson 2);

thus the appeal of the genre connects with the desire of escaping and/or understanding the

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world through someone’s travel experience. Tourism allows a cultural exposure and,

moreover, the movement through space is not always the traveller’s choice as they become

“displaced through economic hardship, environmental disasters and wars” (Thompson 2).

In addition, travel writing from earlier decades helps readers to travel through time and

reflect on similarities to and differences from the current time. Mark Cocker writes that

“travel is one of the greatest doors to human freedom, and the travel book is a medium

through which humans celebrate this freedom” (260).

Books in general have been one of the greatest ways to escape the reality and find

oneself in the middle of someone’s story; however, travel writing pushes the boundaries of

what can be experienced through pages: the openness of landscapes, leaving one place in

search for a different reality, may inspire the reader and aid him or her in a realization of

what kind of journey he or she wishes to take. The impact of such literature on the reader is

tremendous. The reader experiences a different culture or historical moment through the

descriptive words of someone who has travelled, be it a fictional character or a real person.

The expectations of a personal journey may be altered by the travelling experiences

provided in a book. Inadvertently, someone’s experience may become relatable or inspire

the reader to look at oneself and change the perception of the world that surrounds him or

her. Like postcolonial literature, that often tells stories of oppressed human beings, travel

writing provides a staggering experience when the reader learns that journeys are not

always taken by free will and that travel has a great impact on one’s psychological journey.

Moreover, a book which at first might be presented as an adventure and ode to the place

that is being travelled to, might surprise the reader, as its content would lead him or her

through the character’s growth and the change of perception of what has been seen. The

character might start traveling as one person but the locations and the journey that has been

taken might change the character and their impression of the surrounding world. It may

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inspire the character (and the reader) to continue the exploration or, on the contrary,

depress them and make them ache for the homeland. Journey appears to be a confrontation

between or with the self and the otherness.

Travelling, according to Thompson, “requires us to negotiate a complex and

sometimes unsettling interplay between alterity and identity, difference and similarity” (9).

Further, Thompson provides an eloquent definition that sums up the idea accordingly, that

travel “is the negotiation between self and other that is brought about movement and

space” (9). Moreover, he argues that if all travel includes confrontations between self and

other, which happen as a result of movement through space, all travel writing is the

product of that encounter and “negotiation between similarity and difference that it

entailed” (Thompson 9). The description might be presented directly in writing, where

narration may offer the events that resulted in the writer’s journey. Concurrently, the

encounter may only be implicit in writing, offering small details of perspectives and

accounts that “were acquired through travel” (Thompson 9). Throughout his book,

Thompson provides several ideas of what travel writing can represent and consist of,

without pressuring the reader to accept a certain description. This study agrees with one of

his ideas of what travel writing may consist of:

All travel has a two-fold aspect. It is most obviously, of course, a report on the

wider world, an account of an unfamiliar people or place. Yet, it is also revelatory

to a greater or lesser degree of the traveller who produced that report, and of his

or her values, preoccupations and assumptions. And, by extension, it also reveals

something of the culture from which that writer emerged, and/or the culture for

which their text is intended. (Thompson 9)

Thompson claims that in the genre, narratives usually seek to intertwine “the inner

and outer worlds” where more factual objective description of places and people the

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traveller encounters are blended with more naturally subjective account of traveller’s

evaluations and thoughts of the journey (98). However, the balance can greatly vary: “on

the one hand, [it roots from] an extreme subjectivism that concerns itself chiefly with an

inner terrain of thought and feeling, memory and imagination and, on the other, an extreme

objectivism that seeks to present facts about the world with seemingly little or no

narratorial meditation” (Thompson 99).

This study will follow Thompson’s idea of travel writing that encompasses

negotiation between factual and fictional forms mentioned above, where travel literature

may consists of a report of what has been observed and the narration of the assumed and

discovered. It also relies on Hulme’s notion that in order for the text to be considered travel

writing, the author himself must have travelled the places he or she described. This

research follows this premise, as it is a known fact that both authors to be discussed in this

thesis based their books on real journeys. Travelling through America is one of the markers

that can be found in both On the Road and The Grapes of Wrath. The characters of both

books are constantly on the move. The journeys that they experience are not only drawn

from the authors’ imagination but the authors themselves were able to experience some

events and share them with the readers. On the Road is often presented as one of the

greatest novels about travelling around the United States, while The Grapes of Wrath is

mainly associated with the Great Depression of the 1930s. Taking into a consideration that

both The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road are works of fiction about characters going on

the road in search of the specific experiences that significantly rely on the real image of

America and serve as a reflection of reality of specific historical time, further in my

analysis, I want to argue that both novels, can be discussed as examples of travel fiction,

one of the forms of travel writing. This category of travel writing allows the above-

mentioned novels to be perceived as travel writing that on one hand, tries to depict the

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world as objectively and accurately as it can, while on the other hand, it mediates with the

filtered fictional world that eases the reader into the story.

2.2. Travel Fiction as a Category of Travel Writing

In this study, I will analyze two novels by two significant writers of the twentieth century,

namely John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac. However, it cannot be claimed that the novels

fall under the category of travel writing without any elaboration and explanation. This

subchapter discusses the relationship of the chosen novels to the sub-genre (or a category)

of travel writing that is travel fiction.

The previous section suggested that a certain degree of travelling or movement is

present in any text that seeks to describe somebody’s physical or mental act of movement

towards or from something. But what helps travel writing to stand out as a genre of its own

is the mutual influence of the physical journey taken, which helps the character and the

reader (and often the author) to critically look at the surroundings passed by, and the

mental journey that often overwhelms but aids the traveller in self-discovery. The

characters of The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road, willingly or not, have to go through

the physical journey in order to critically look at themselves and receive an eye-opening

experience of what exactly makes the characters to set out on the road.

Often displays in bookstores and articles on the Internet suggest books such as On

the Road as a popular choice of travel (writing) books. For instance, the famous web

search engine Google lists On the Road as the second result when searching for travel

books. Additionally, Steinbeck’s Travels with Charlie also appears as a suggested travel

book, while his novel The Grapes of Wrath is usually represented as a book that deals with

people’s hardships during the time of the Great Depression in the United States. Moreover,

in the academic world, not every scholar would agree that Kerouac’s On the Road and

Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath belong to the genre of travel writing as the novels also

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fall under the category of fictional literature; and travel writing has to be a truthful

experience and an honest report of everything that the author has been acquainted.

According to Percy G. Adams, scholars and theorists have been questioning integrity of

fictional works since the 16th century (9). However, in his book about travel literature, he

also writes about the evolution of the novel and discusses the theories of several critics

who talk about the necessity of the evolution of fictional forms and point out that the genre

cannot be generalized (Adams 9). Adams quotes Ralph Freedman who addresses the

importance of backgrounds and the evolutionary process and suggests that the novel has

got the specific roots that “reach down to different layers of soil” and its “many strands

reach to the most varied layers of time” and provides an example of early long narrative

fiction that roots in the picaresque novel (Adams 5).

This is the point where I wish to introduce the notion of travel fiction in this study.

This is a sub-genre that allows books like On the Road and The Grapes of Wrath to exist

within travel writing genre. I emphasize that travel writing genre is heavily layered and

travel fiction sub-genre is not an exception. The boundaries of what travel fiction may

contain are too not firmly fixed. According to Carl Thompson, the “‘travel book’ is a

central branch” of the travel writing that follows the first-person narrative of travel and “it

claims to be a true record of the author’s true experiences” (Thompson 27). However, he

argues that the genre is too ambiguous to treat the travel book as a non-fictional form

(Thompson 27). He further explains that examples of travel writing “are by definition

textual artefacts, that have been constructed by their writers and publishers” (Thompson

27). It is highly impossible for one to record an interrupted and true experience without

omitting and disregarding parts of the experience that the author may have thought to be

too irrelevant to share.

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Following Hulme’s and Thompson’s ideas, one must acknowledge that The Grapes

of Wrath and On the Road are hybrids of both fictional and factual accounts of travelling.

Especially in the case of the chosen books, it is impossible to find a critical term describing

the genre perfectly. According to Thompson, the “distinction between ‘fiction’ and ‘non-

fiction’ in travel writing is not as clear-cut” as one might initially assume” (27). It is also

hard to overlook the mutual influence of fictional and factual accounts of travel as any

“travel accounts have historically formed one of the main sources for the novel and travel

writers continue to utilize fictional devices such as an episodic structure, picaresque

motifs, and (most significantly) the foregrounding of a narrator”, as Morgan writes (qtd in

Youngs 4). Kerouac documented his personal experience, which influenced creating On

the Road. He based fictional characters on his friends, family, and people whom he had

met while travelling (Charters xx). Steinbeck, whose original travel accounts were written

for the San Francisco News newspaper, intertwined his fictional universe with the field

reports about the lives of American migrant workers during the Great Depression

(Timmerman 103). In The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Youngs quotes

Dinah Roma Sianturi who discusses the heterogeneous nature of travel writing, as it

crosses boundaries and unsettles the conventions of other disciplines (3). Travel writing is

both fact and fiction. Both The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road are novels based on facts

and on a real journey undertaken by their authors. Both Kerouac with the descriptions of

his journeys and Steinbeck in his original articles about migration were able to recreate the

atmosphere they witnessed and turn their travel accounts into fiction. Some scholars

believe that instead of viewing the travel writing genre as one that is hard to define, we

should accept that this is actually what defines it: “It is a genre whose intergeneric features

constitute its identity” (Youngs 6).

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Aware of the background and the circumstances under which the novels were

written, it becomes evident that Steinbeck and Kerouac negotiate between being

documentarists, describing the setting as accurately as possible, and being story-tellers, as

the authors are seeking the way to engage readers’ interest. As Thompson puts it, “travel

experience is thus crafted into travel text, and this crafting process must inevitably

introduce into the text, to a greater or lesser degree, a fictive dimension” (Thompson 27-

28). A degree of fictionality varies from text to text. There are writers who record their

journeys as truthfully as they can. Steinbeck and Kerouac also fall under another category

where they choose freely to balance fiction and facts and interweave story-telling and

reportage (Thompson 29). As Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan put it, travel writing

should be regarded as “fictions of factual representation” (qtd in Thompson 30). In

addition, although some theorists see fiction to be a lie, especially when it comes to travel

accounts, according to Adams it deserves to be defended as “in spite of the commonplace

dismissal of fiction as trifling, there is the pleasure principle; that is pleasure is good in

itself” (13). Albeit the dissolution of considering books that fuse fiction and reality as a

foreground genre by some critics, nevertheless, it is worthy of the esteem. And as Adams

further explains, despite the fact that if the reader only gains pleasure from the books,

which is considered trifling literature by some, he argues that “pleasure was for many

readers not only a good intrinsically but one that led to others – for example, instruction

and moral edification” (Adams 14). Adams declares that fiction does not only deal with

imagination but with instruction in history and manners, representing current reality (17).

There is not “a conflict between the imagination and the attempt to represent reality; for

the harder one strives to create something lifelike, the more one’s inventive skills are

taxed” (Adams 17).

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Books like The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road encompass factual accounts,

which allow the readers to travel through the writers’ words, and an aesthetic pleasure of a

fictional world. This negotiation between a report and a tale is perhaps what appeals to the

reader, “the more literary end of the genre, a wave of travel writing […] that confounds our

conventional categories of fiction and non-fiction, in order to explore the competing claims

of imagination, reason and moral responsibility in our engagement with the world”

(Thompson 29-30). The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road have an undeniable feel of

reality that subsequently borders with fiction that romanticizes the reality. The reason why

in these stories fact and fiction work so well is because the reality of travelling de-

romanticizes the adventures that the characters (or the authors) have to take in order to find

the story or the explanation. Fictional part softens the blow helping the reader to cope with

the overwhelming reality by treating fictional characters as imaginary personalities.

The balance between narrating personal experience and creating a fictionalized

reality is not the only common ground that both authors share: both Steinbeck and Kerouac

happened to write about the experience of certain decades that belong to the twentieth

century. The characters of both The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road are set for different

journeys, however, one of the most important similarities shared is the means of travelling,

a car, which plays a distinct role in narrating the characters’ travelling experience.

2.3. Twentieth-Century Travel Writing, Car Culture, (Auto)mobility, and Identity

The novels chosen for discussion are both products of the twentieth-century literature and

the significance of historical and cultural events has shaped the content of the books. In

general, the travel writing of the twentieth century can be distinguished from earlier travel

writing. Youngs mentions three phenomena that contributed to the “conscious inter- and

metatextual reflection on the conventions of travel writing” that Korte claims is a particular

feature of post-1900 travel writing (68). First is a car culture, which has changed people’s

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sense of speed, their engagement with the landscape and their relationship with one

another, and the second presents intellectual and aesthetic movements that have radically

influenced ideas of the self, truth and authority, and of artistic representation (Youngs 68).

Third, decolonization and “the politics of ‘race”, alongside with liberation movements,

produced travel texts challenging colonial stereotypes (Youngs 68). Innovations in

technologies changed people’s travel experience. Motorcar travelling differed from other

forms of travelling. Suddenly people were able to enjoy and explore countries and to gain

new experience that was almost unobtainable with other forms of transportation.

The increasing popularity of automobiles shaped the way people travelled in the

twentieth century. Sidonie Smith writes that the progressiveness of the railroad could not

compete with the desire for flexible transportation and growing discontent with railroad

monopolies pressured for the development of an alternative way to transport farm

commodities and industrial goods – the highway system (98). The promise of a small

engine that could take individuals on their own journey and a personal mobility generated

public enthusiasm and the individual mode of mobility became a popular choice in the

industrialized West (Smith 99). American society is well known for its love of freedom,

independence and dislike of the government looking over its shoulder. Moreover, the

automobile has become a necessity of everyday life. Since the early twentieth century, the

automobile industry brought comfort and partially disposed of planning and ticket

purchasing. The automobile not only became one of the most desired consumer goods but

it drastically changed the consumer culture. Everything became more accessible in terms

of distance. People who lived in communities located far away from the big cities could

now take trips and buy necessary products (Smith 99). Motorized modernity came right

into the home where the mass-produced automobile alleviated the routines of middle-class,

Smith writes (100). Yet, it simultaneously created a vehicle of escape. Now people could

17

speed away from mind-numbing domestic routines and explore the land for new

experiences (Smith 100).

Car travel changed the perspective and offered new ways of travelling to

passengers. While vehicles like planes and locomotives were designed to get a passenger

from point A to point B, automobile travel multiplied destinations and routes one could

take. Both locomotive and automobile travel create the perception of living in a motion,

while the passenger is more or less passive, the world outside the window fleets away

(Smith 100). Locomotive travel limits the range of what can be observed, as the traveler’s

coach location will play a big role as he or she may choose to face the future surroundings

or look in the window to see what is left behind (Smith 100). Moreover, if the location

choice is made for the traveler, he or she is not in charge of a travel experience.

Automobile multiplies the perception of what to be observed during travelling as from the

inside of automobile, several angles of viewing the landscape are available and there are no

fixed perspectives (Smith 100). The driver can look straight ahead and see the road in front

of him or her. The choice can be made to look around and of course to look back in the

rear window. The change of perspective, the speed and the motion create travelling

experience of the twentieth century. (Smith 100) The automobilist can experience freedom

of movement and explore their individuality. Metallic carapace does not tame the traveler

but serves as an extension of the body and lets the driver to experience “faster” body

(Smith 100). To use Smith’s words, the “fusion of the body and machine facilitates speedy

escape – from the past, from the static routines of domesticity, and from outmoded

identity” (Smith 100). Being physically able to escape any location frees traveler’s mind

and lets explore the old in a new way. The automobile promises new directions and entices

by unknown future routes: “the perception of being in motion, being ‘on the road’, that is

the prized experience” (Smith 101).

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Travelling, whether linked with the desire or a compelled and forced decision of

hitting the road and driving away in search of different and better life, exciting sights and

promise of the better, makes the traveler leave their home behind. I have mentioned above

that the car serves as an extension of the body that lets the automobilist explore the

surroundings faster. The “Power” of a car goes beyond that as it also replaces houses for

alternative homes – mobile homes. In Driving Women, Deborah Clarke writes that

“automobility replaced stability”, which means that automobiles now serve as a symbol of

stable life (140). The vehicles could now replace a traveller’s home and create a home

space inside the car. Nevertheless, Clarke mentions that Americans are in love and

dependent on their metallic friends, and their love towards mobile homes, like trailers, is

only a romanticized idea of “mobile homelessness” (Clarke 140). The problem of

homelessness in the United States makes an alternative idea of a house on wheels

appealing, as the cars look more and more comfortable and livable (Clarke 141).

During the Great Depression, automobiles became literal homes for many

Americans, and an example of this can be seen in The Grapes of Wrath. People were

losing their homes that they had shared with their families for several generations. People

were unemployed, and poor, and they could not afford to find cheap accommodations so

cars stopped being luxury and became a necessity – a home, a vehicle that still could get

them to possibilities of getting work and desired home space. However, later in the

twentieth century, the era of “The Beat Generation” glorified car culture and the on the

road version of homelessness. The exhaustion from the Vietnam and Cold Wars,

Communism and intolerance, materialism, and military power alienated some individuals

from the success; materialistic desires and static middle class conformities like a house

with a white picked fans became things that the younger generations were running from.

Car became a tool of escapism and living in a moment. As in On the Road, Kerouac

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created the atmosphere of endless road towards something he, his peers and characters of

his book could not reach what is named in the book an elusive “it” that means both nothing

and everything at the same time.

This study follows and examines the road travel motif in On the Road and The

Grapes of Wrath. Inevitably, the paradigm of mobility and movement emerges on the

surface, as the limits and ways of movement are an important part of story-telling in the

novels. When one thinks about mobility, the first association might be a movement through

space but mobility may also encompass immobility and stillness, physical and social

boundaries. Mobility might be desired but also feared. Mobility can range from travelling

by foot, animal-powered transport, locomotive travel, car travel and plane travel and each

experience will differ from the other one by what has been observed and what has been

encountered. Mobility might be unequal: “mobility is associated with freedom of

movement but also with its direct opposite”, as the stories of asylum seekers, refugees and

migrants would confirm (Woodward 467). In each case, the circumstances under which

mobility is presented to the traveler differ from each other. In the Western world mobility

has become romanticized and desired. For instance, the Beat Generation, famous for

breaking from conservative constraints, inspired themselves and others to experience

spontaneity. Wanting to live in a moment, they “promoted numerous spontaneous art

forms and social behaviours [including] spur-of-the-moment road trips” (Lawlor 340). It

was a way to experience, or so they thought, the life to the fullest. Movement is a powerful

tool of escapism and with an access to a car, the road holds the possibilities in front of the

driver and a break from conventions that were holding him or her back. For Americans, the

freedom of movement has been known as an aspiration in life but this freedom, again, is

exercised differently by different groups of people. In Mobility at Large, Edwards and

Graulund mention that mobility may not only be subjective:

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A specific experience can also engender cultural mobility that have a profound

impact on space, culture and society. For travel is much more than just a

movement between places. It inevitably involves positionings and re-positionings

that deconstruct and reconstruct the individual traveller in new environments –

experiences that influence and change perceptions of the foreign and familiar,

subject and society. (10)

Mobility has been an inherent part of American society since the first settlers found

their new home on American grounds. In comparison with a static and discovered Europe,

America has always offered the possibility of moving west in search of new experiences or

home (Brigham, “Sinclair Lewis’s” 103). In A Brief History of American Culture, Robert

Crunden discusses Alexis de Tocqueville, a French political thinker and historian, and

mentions Tocqueville’s observations about America. At first, for Tocqueville, “France had

an obvious national character” and America lacked distinctive cultural traits (Crunden 90-

91). However, later, Tocqueville discovered that although “there are no American moeurs

as yet a restless temper seems to me one of the distinctive traits of this people”

(Tocqueville qtd in Crunden 91). Restlessness and will to expand the horizon, to move

further or from something is what can describe an American. Crunden further explains that

“Americans seemed always on the move, self-reliant and largely free of tradition” (91). He

continues quoting Tocqueville who observed that “the American has no time to tie himself

to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural

state of man”(91).

But mobility cannot only mean a physical movement as different experiences,

especially those that include re-locating and dislocating, shape and change the mind of the

traveler whether the change has been desired all along or has caught the traveler of guard.

While relocating physically, the traveller not only changes a physical perspective but the

21

mind set changes along its physical representation. According to Ann Brigham, the road

trip does not only serve as a mean of mobility but it’s an actual representation of an

American experience (American Road Narratives n.p.). In the vast of the United States, the

road provides new perspectives on an individual freed from the constraints of home and

society. Like On the Road, road narratives construct the mythology of American liberation

from constraints into the view. However, admitting that freedom, rebellion and the promise

of escape serve as the type of mobility that helps to understand American identity,

Brigham argues that mobility is not solely a way to disengage from society, space or

identity but it also serves as a mode of engaging with it (American Road Narratives n.p.).

She writes that “mobility is tension filled because it is a mode with engaging with

tensions” (American Road Narratives n.p.) and contrasting to the conceptualization of

“mobility as a mechanism of escaping the tensions”, Brigham argues that one should be

skeptical about mobility serving as “a fixed opposition of home and away as a form of

detachment but rather as incorporation” (American Road Narratives n.p.). By

incorporation, she means “a search for new spaces and options for subjectivity that will

propel the traveller to a different location - whether that be spatial, intellectual, cultural,

social personal, or some combination thereof” (Brigham, American Road Narratives n.p.).

Somehow, Americans appear to feel displaced in their own country and keep exploring and

moving to find something or get lost. This is the authentic identity of America. The same

experiences cannot be found in the Old World because it is perhaps easier to grasp the idea

of being lost in the new country where one does not belong in the same way as in one’s

own homeland.

With an introduction of automobile industry and infrastructure, another experience of

travel became inherited within American imagery. American road travelling in a car

became a desired experience among many people; mobility in America presents itself

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differently than the experience of hitting the road in another continents. For example, when

travelling across Europe, a traveller crosses different countries with different languages,

cultures, and traditions. They may overwhelm and confuse the traveler as he or she passes

multiple physical and mental borders. On the other hand, when one travels across America,

one travels different states within one country, getting acquainted with different traditions

within one culture that attract native inhabitants and tourists to relocate and find new

possibilities and experience, something what the place that one calls home currently can

not offer. Somehow cultural borders within the United States do not limit traveller and

have the opposite effect of freeing body and mind, and passing landscapes seems to inspire

the traveller to take the road. Perhaps it is the attraction of starting over and searching for

new possibilities within the borders of one’s home country. One can leave own home but

at the same time, they do not leave it for good because the travelling takes place within

homeland. Ann Brigham discusses the relationship between mobility and incorporation in

her essay that examines Free Air by Sinclair Lewis and points out:

Cross-country auto travel does not enact the free-spirited expression of self, a

claim so often made about mobility in all American road narratives. Instead,

mobility takes shape as the gradual education of the self, which is realized

through a series of geographical and social dislocations that function not as a

mode of detachment or escape but rather as a method of entry and incorporation

into the larger nation. (Brigham, “Sinclair Lewis’s” 102)

Relocation within the United States is a way to get reacquainted with the familiar and

find something whilst traveling. Brigham quotes the geographer Tim Cresswell who has

identified the role of mobility in the construction of an American national identity and

imaginary as primary and compared a limited and already developed Europe to America,

which could keep moving and expanding West (Brigham, “Sinclair Lewis’s” 102-103).

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“The United States was different from Europe, it was claimed, because its people were less

rooted in space and time” (Cresswell quoted in Brigham, “Sinclair Lewis’s” 103). On the

basis of Cresswell’s text, Brigham states that mobility created “a new American spirit” that

was formed by people moving to America from other countries and the American nation

moving within the country itself (“Sinclair Lewis’s” 103). Mobility began to embody “a

uniquely American geographical and historical experience guaranteeing freedom,

opportunity and independence” (Cresswell qtd in Brigham, “Sinclair Lewis’s” 103).

However, Cresswell does not only argue that mobility is presented as a positive

mobility but also as a threat to “the rooted existence and moral existence of a place”

(Brigham, “Sinclair Lewis’s” 103). From the viewpoint of place being a right and “moral

world”, people who move (excessively) like (im)migrants, the homeless and so on

compromise the purity and coziness of home and neighborhood (“Sinclair Lewis’s” 103).

Moreover, racial, ethnical and gender mobility are often considered “a threat to social

order” (Brigham, “Sinclair Lewis’s” 103). Brigham uses Cresswell’s conflicting

explanations of mobility, where “mobility and the promise of it [is] integral to the

American national imaginary and yet […] its meaning is not one-dimensional, ahistorical,

or fixed”, and argues that mobility not only offers a way out of tensions the traveller is

trying to escape but mobility may as well act as a “mode of engaging with tensions”

(Cresswell qtd in Brigham, “Sinclair Lewis’s” 103-104). While Brigham points out that the

majority of scholars conceptualize mobility as a way of escaping the tensions, she also

talks about how mobility can deal with and manage social and cultural tensions, especially

when those tensions concern issues of incorporation (“Sinclair Lewis’s” 104). She claims

that “mobility introduces an otherness that is both spatial and social, and road narratives

emphasize the working out of difference as the traveler seeks or fails to be incorporated

with a different space or identity” (“Sinclair Lewis’s” 104). It is crucial for the future

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analysis of The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road to consider that mobility is as multi-

dimensional as Brigham and Cresswell point out above. The American road may

physically remain static throughout decades but the changes in society, culture, and politics

shape the same road differently for people from different generations.

2.4. The Culture of American Road

“The road trip’s status [is] an iconic American experience”, Ann Brigham writes in her

critical essay about major approaches to the American road narrative genre (“Critical

Meeting Places” 15). While the car might be an important reason why Americans love

travelling and tourists are eager to plan road trips across America, the landscape, the roads

that let travellers to cross one American state after another, are an important part of

travelling America. Brigham provides an eloquent description of the road that helps to

contextualize road narratives within the American landscape:

As a space and a symbol, the road represents expansiveness and open-endedness.

It may lead out of somewhere specific, but it could go anywhere. In the vast

United States, and in our vaster imaginations, the road twists and turns, offering

new directions, exciting detours, unprecedented access, and a beckoning horizon.

(“Critical Meeting Places” Brigham 15-16)

While the United States is not the only country in the world that people wish to

travel to, it attracts both natives and tourists as every state represents a different shade of

America. Moreover, the road not only leads the traveller towards the exploration of space

and landscape, but the road takes on a journey of exploring one’s own mind. People feel

excitement and anticipate future adventures during travelling. However, travelling can be

often unpredictable, no matter how many precautions and planning a traveller underwent.

But travelling, and the road in particular, have been associated with endless possibilities

and promise. The road can be unsettling but exciting. Any moment driver can change the

25

direction, keep moving forward or turn around and start over. The idea of starting over

anywhere and anytime allures the American mind. American spirit “breathes” freedom and

constantly searches for it. Brigham encourages comparing the spacious and limitless road

to a fixed and “carefully mapped” street (Brigham, “Critical Meeting Places” 16). Streets

are bound by buildings and addresses and “signify settlement” whereas on the road

“nothing seems settled” (“Critical Meeting Places” 16). As Brigham mentions, “in

opposition to a spatial pathway that represents the known, the road holds out the promise

and possibility of the unknown—or unrealized” (Brigham, “Critical Meeting Places” 16).

Furthermore, Brigham points out three major themes that are critically analyzed in road

narratives that road itself represents: escape, freedom, and discovery (“Critical Meeting

Places” 16). Released from the constraints of often depressive home space, the road

promises an escape from commitments, hardships and routines and it “releases travelers

from the forces that have shaped them” (Brigham, “Critical Meeting Places” 16).

In other words, the road not only expands and offers change in the surroundings,

but it also extends the possibilities of traveler to critically look at oneself and learn new

things about one’s own character. The escape that the road offers is appealing to those who

do not have any commitments and little to leave behind but also for those travellers who

feel comfortable in their living situations and social relations. Thus, the possibility of a

new beginning and freedom makes travelers equal in the same way as people in many

social and economic situations find escapism and discovery of something new appealing.

In Brigham’s words, “the road narrative seems to represent a form that is characteristically,

perhaps uniquely, American in the way that it explicitly links the road with a larger

national ideal of freedom” (“Critical Meeting Places” 18). Brigham writes that “the road

endures as a realm of possibility and promise” and this association starts with its special

character (Brigham, “Critical Meeting Places” 15). The desire for a new start has been

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running through American veins continuously like the roads that are spread across the

country; and the belief that America is the Land of Promise has never left American mind.

Travelling the roads of America has helped to concretely shape this state of mind.

In her essay, Brigham mentions that several scholars associate the genre of road

narratives with “intrinsic American-ness” and others point out that road narratives help to

get a glimpse into social relations and cultural myths (“Critical Meeting Places” 15). One

of those myths is the American Dream whose meaning has changed over decades,

depending on cultural, economical and social situations in the country. As the notion of the

American Dream was built on the ideas of equal opportunity, exercising freedom, the

possibility of pursuing happiness, success, prosperity and stability, we can compare or

even include road travelling experience as a part of the American Dream as both contain

similar goals and expectations. Lawrence R. Samuel writes in The American Dream: A

Cultural History that the automobile and road travel are one of the “clearest expression of

the American Dream” (Samuel 153). He continues that whenever Americans were

“speeding down the road that they most viscerally represented the Dream’s fundamental

dimension of freedom” (154). Jean Baudrillard, who dedicated a book to America,

encompasses the experience of hitting the road and true American spirit that seeks freedom

on the road. He writes passages dedicated to car travel and explains that only by driving a

car in America can one learn more about America than any scholastic book (Baudrillard

54-55). And the American Dream, the movement through American space, continues to

exist, inspiring people of different age to search for realizations and discoveries on the

road. American author and climber Brendan Leonard writes that to him “there was nothing

more American than hopping in [his] car and taking off to drive Out West, hoping

something big, something life-altering, something that would make sense of life, would

happen” (3). He writes this in his book The New American Road Trip Mixtape where he

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tells the story of a period of time that he spent on the road, very much like Jack Kerouac

and John Steinbeck. Leonard’s novel can be seen as a homage to the above-mentioned

authors as Leonard refers to them repeatedly. Although Kerouac seems to be his biggest

hero, he quotes On the Road and with every word proves to the reader how much Kerouac

and especially his book On the Road has influenced his life. Leonard’s book is a perfect

example of how influential road novels are: after a certain twist in his life Leonard decides

to find his answers on the road; he narrates his life but also perhaps unintentionally gives

suitable examples of how American it is to drop the past life and move towards something

new.

In this study Leonard’s novel is considered a theoretical source that gives

explanations of why taking the road is often considered so intrinsically American.

Previously I have mentioned that I am examining The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road

because although the characters inside the books are fictional, the journeys are real and we

see certain decades of America through the eyes of people who knew the country well,

thus the experience is fundamental and it allows seeing the change and/or discovery of

America by Americans. Therefore, Leonard’s book acts as a reflection onto the culture that

was created by authors like Kerouac and Steinbeck, perhaps unintentionally by some.

Figuring out a life on the road becomes an acceptable cannon for people like Leonard, and

hitting the road becomes in a way therapeutical and travelling may provide the traveller

with answers or bring him back to the starting point. “I’d get in some good thinking on the

road. I’d figure out what was next for me, and when I did, it would be beautiful, heroic,

with majestic theme music playing in the background as I drove into another sunset”, he

writes, implying that if he would just take the journey as his heroes, Steinbeck and

Kerouac did, he would get his clear answers (3). Although he mentions that his America

was not the America of Steinbeck and Kerouac, he relates to their experiences (Post-War,

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Cold War) through the new experiences of new America like the house market crash of

2008 when Americans felt like they were trapped again (25). Moreover, when talking

about how much American culture takes in from the road, how many movies and songs are

written about on the road experience, he poses the question whether their “romance with

the highway [is] a relic of a previous generation” (Leonard 25). He asks if he and fellow

Americans “believe in the mythical American road trip”, as he wanted to believe that

“driving out into the wide open and staring off into it for a while was good for something,

that it could be powerful, healing, whatever happens” (25). Similarly, Ann Brigham

discusses the image of the open road and answers questions about cultural significance of

American mobility. She writes that the fundamental desire that Americans experience

when thinking about hitting the road is to reconnect with their homeland (Brigham,

American Road Narratives, n.p.). For instance, she claims that the events of the 9/11

tragedy influenced Americans with their families to hit the road in order to (re)discover the

pleasures of seeing their country (Brigham, American Road Narratives n.p.). Travelling the

United States proves to be therapeutic for Americans, when something bad happens to

them and in their country. American landscapes and image save its people and the country

itself. As Brigham writes:

The road trip proved doubly connective. It united Americans with the greater

nation and it did so in a particular way: through up-close and intimate

experiences with back roads, small towns, campgrounds, and the family

atmosphere of RV. Road travel, in effect, merged scales: it made the national

local, and the local national. Joining individual with country, it also sited the

intrinsic qualities of the nation. (American Road Narratives n.p.)

It is the nation of believers and dreamers. Baudrillard writes that America is the only

country that gives one an opportunity to be “brutally naïve” (28). He treats America as the

29

centre of the world that gives him “a feeling of real ascetism” (Baudrillard 28). For him,

there is no other place like the United States that can give him an astral quality that he

wanted to find – freedom of the freeways and the desert of speed (Baudrillard 5).

According to Brigham, from the early twentieth century Americans were encouraged to

embrace their country as a tourist destination not as an opposition to travelling in Europe

but in search for, as Belasco puts it, “uniquely American values” (qtd. in Brigham,

American Road Narratives n.p.). Travel literature from the early twentieth century

promoted car travelling as the way to “make manifest the country’s identity as a national

space, rather than the series of regions” (Brigham, American Road Narratives n.p.).

Leonard writes: “I didn’t want to fly halfway around the world, see the Eiffel Tower, the

Colosseum, or whatever. “I felt better placing a bet on driving west, trying to paint on a

familiar canvas” (16), proving that it was and is not only easier for Americans to travel

their own land but it easier to be healed through the local landscapes. American history

that is mapped across American states “links national identity to a shared territory and

history” (Shaffer qtd in Brigham, American Road Narratives n.p.). The response to

conditions and events that have happened in America since the early 1920s has been

consistent: travelling in America became the way to deal and reconnect with the country

and thus it has become “an Authentic American experience” (Brigham, American Road

Narratives n.p.). Brigham argues that the experience is fulfilled not only through but also

while driving (American Road Narratives n.p.). For instance, Leonard, who gives up his

life and belongings for driving aimlessly for days, writes: “there was hope riding along in

the car somewhere” (Leonard 35). Brigham examines how much the American national

imaginary has been shaped by the promise of mobility: it provides the freedom to go

anywhere and reinvent oneself. She argues that the road trip is not only a way but also an

actual representation of American experience: “It both directs and projects an experience

30

of Americanness. While American traveller connects to the family or/and the country, the

road trip manifests “an American as a mobile subject”. And it also “reasserts the mobility

as an American subject” (Brigham, American Road Narratives n.p.). In other words, the

road trip represents the connection between the freedom, becoming someone new: “spatial

mobility – the movement between places or across space – has often been understood as a

way to achieve a range of other mobilities, from the social and economic to the

psychological and sexual” (Brigham, American Road Narratives n.p.). The promise of

mobility, another American dream, has been shaped as “a quintessential expression of

Americanness” (Brigham, American Road Narratives n.p.).

2.5. The American Dream

One of the important similarities that connect Steinbeck and Kerouac’s novels is the

characters’ quest for the American Dream. According to Samuel, there has been no

consensus about the meaning of the American Dream and the answers such as financial

stability, the good life and the pursuit of happiness making it seem more like a “wish list”

than a mythology of the United States (Samuel 1). Yet, the American Dream has been

central to the American idea and experience: it plays an active part in every day life,

shaping American identity (Samuel 1). The Dream is present in spheres such as

“economics, politics, law, work, business, [and] education” (Samuel 2), and the American

nation is “at some level a marketplace of competing interpretations and visions of what it

means and should mean” (Samuel 1). The proof of the Dream’s relevance and resiliency

can also be traced from the great social movements like the New Deal, counterculture,

feminist and civil rights movements as the American Dream was their foundation, for

instance the ideal of equal opportunity (Samuel 2-3). The roots of the phrase the

“American Dream” go back centuries before it was coined in 1931 by James Truslow

Adams during the Great Depression (Samuel 3):

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The dream is a vision of a better, deeper, richer life for every individual,

regardless of the position in society which he or she may occupy by the accident

of birth. It has been a dream of a chance to rise in the economic scale, but quite as

much, or more than that, of a chance to develop our capacities to the full,

unhampered by unjust restrictions of caste or custom. With this has gone the hope

of bettering the physical conditions of living, of lessening the toil and anxieties of

daily life. (Adams qtd in Samuel 13)

Adams’s original idea behind the term was “the inherent right to be restricted by no

barriers” (Adams qtd in Samuel 14). However, the basic idea of the American Dream was

already articulated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution: the place in life is

earned rather than inherited; Americans are a meritocracy rather than an aristocracy, and

the key concepts of American identity include traits such as opportunism, self-reliance,

pragmatism, resourcefulness, being aspirational, inventiveness and so on (Lawrence 3).

Moreover, Samuel suggests that “expansive and progressive undercurrent [of the American

Dream] is rooted in [American] peripatetic orientation and frontier experience” (3). For

instance, in recent years one of the more popular expressions of the American Dream is the

recreational vehicle (RV) that is not so different from the covered wagon (3). As it was

mentioned earlier, Ann Brigham also discusses how after the events of 9/11 American

families were hitting the roads in their RVs visiting historic cities and patriotic sites to find

the pleasure of seeing America again and reconnecting to the family and America itself

(Brigham, American Road Narratives n.p.). According to Samuel, “the desire to own a

piece of the land, as [it] is [American] mandate to not be tread upon or fenced in” (3) is

another expression of the dream despite “the iconic symbol of the white picket fence” (3).

And lastly, “the enduring desire to reinvent [oneself], to be whomever [Americans] want

to be, […] [and American] famous restlessness are [a] part of the equation. Despite having

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ups and down, the Dream had always managed to find its way in American life, and

recovering, it also managed to reflect and renew the American spirit” (Samuel 4).

The mythology has proven to be resilient, surviving crisis after crisis (e.g. the Great

Depression and the subprime-mortgage crisis) exemplifying that it is capable of surviving

any traumatic event (Samuel 4). The dream has continually transformed but somehow it

also remained the same and the reason for that is the Dream’s “profound ambiguity”

(Samuel 4) as it is a product of American collective imagination, it could mean anything

Americans want or need it to mean. As Samuel writes, “the Dream is both radical and

conservative, spiritual and secular, […] accommodating of virtually any preconception or

agenda” (4). Samuel offers a great variety of different meanings for the American Dream

that are worth of the closer exploration, however, for this particular research the following

readings of the American Dream are considered to be the most appropriate and fitting: “the

fantasy of a perfect life, the quest to achieve something just beyond the reach, a home of

one’s own, a society without poverty or crime” and “the impetus for personal

transformation” (5-6). These particular expressions of the American Dream are crucial in

the novels under study as they are incorporated in its expression that is highly important in

this research as well, mobility. These meanings of the American Dream will be explored

more broadly in the analysis part of this thesis.

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3. Analysis of The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road

In this section of this thesis, I will analyze the mobility in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of

Wrath and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and present the similarities found in the books’

road narratives. In light of the theoretical approaches introduced in the previous chapter, in

Chapter 3.1, I will present the plot overviews of the chosen materials and I will also

demonstrate the relation between fact and fiction in the chosen novels.

I will discuss mobility, its narrative and elements found in the novels in Chapter 3.2. I

will also demonstrate how Steinbeck and Kerouac apply “personification” to the elements

of mobility like the road and an automobile transforming them into the characters of the

novel among the main characters. I am also going to provide an analysis of the expressions

of the American Dream that can be found in The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road. The

last segment in my analysis, Chapter 3.4., explores the movement west in both novels and

its meaning to the characters in the reference to their fantasies about what the west

represents.

3.1. Introducing the Novels: Behind the Creative Process of John Steinbeck and Jack

Kerouac’s Novels

John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac, the authors of the subjected to be analyzed novels wrote

their respective novels wishing to transcribe the experience of the real people transformed

into fictional characters taken on the road. However, their novels’ road motif is not the

only similarity that connects the stories that Kerouac and Steinbeck narrate. The writing

process of both novels also presents as a peculiar similarity. In his introduction to The

Grapes of Wrath Robert DeMott quotes Steinbeck who confides in his journal that for him

for The Grapes of Wrath to be a proper book, it would have to be a true American book,

based only on honesty (DeMott vii). Similarly, Jack Kerouac, who had to start his book

over several times, in order to give his fictional characters a good plot, realized that for

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him to accomplish the aim, he had to type non-stop, find the story, and base On the Road

on his own search of his place in America (Charters xviii). Their vision did not let the

writers down and brought both Kerouac and Steinbeck the status of one of the greatest

American authors of the twentieth century.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is a National Book Award, Pulitzer and

Noble Prize winning novel. Steinbeck did not want his novel to become a popular or

commercially successful book but ironically, The Grapes of Wrath has become one of the

most well-known and thoroughly discussed novels of the twentieth-century American

literature (DeMott ix).

The novel is set during the Great Depression and focuses on the Joads, an

Oklahoma family of farmers, who due to a drought, dust storms, known as the Dust Bowl,

and agricultural and economical changes, are forced to leave their tenant home and like

other thousands of families set out for California hoping for a better and secure life with

job opportunities and land to work. The family sells almost every possession worth money

to buy a car and travel as a family safely to the Promised Land. The family, and Ma Joad in

particular, believe in the good of people and help others like Jim Casy, an ex-preacher

whom they take on the road with them. During their travel, they meet different people who

also believe in collectivity. However, the road to California becomes troubling as some

family members start losing hope and question whether they can make it there after all.

The tight family starts to lose its members one by one. At last, they reach California but the

family has to deal with discrimination and face treatment as outsiders and trespassers in

their own country. The family’s time in California does not proceed as planned as they

struggle to find steady and well paid jobs and their dreams start to get crushed realizing

that it will be a long time until they will be able to save money to buy their own house and

own land. The matter becomes more complicated when one of the best working hands of

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the family, Tom Joad, has to leave the family because of his criminal past that catches up

with him in the land of California. At the end of the novel, the remaining members of the

family find themselves in the worst conditions of the whole journey but still in possession

of morality, humanity, and the will to keep fighting for a better life.

Steinbeck rightfully deserves the success that the novel obtained, as he was able to

execute a new to him writing technique and smoothly combine a report narrative with a

fictional story-telling. The novel is based on “The Harvest Gypsies”, a series of seven

articles that were published in the San Francisco News, whose editor George West pitched

the idea about the series of articles on conditions in the agricultural belt of the San Joaquin

Alley and it focused “on the plight of the migrants and the government’s efforts to supply

sanitary camps for them” (Timmerman 103). Thomas Collins, to whom the second part of

The Grapes of Wrath was dedicated, was Steinbeck’s source of migrant information.

According to DeMott, Collins introduced Steinbeck with the real-life models of the Joads

and Jim Casy and also served as an inspiration for the fictional character of Jim Rawley,

the manager of one of the government camps. Steinbeck started writing the book in 1938,

and like many other American authors he tried to find a writing style that would suit him

by intertwining his own “vision and experience with a variety of cultural forms and literary

styles” (DeMott x). He drew inspiration for his book from several sources:

the jump-cut technique of John Dos Passo’s U.S.A. trilogy, the narrative tempo of

Pare Lorentz’s radio drama Ecce Homo! and the sequential quality of [several]

Lorentz’s films, the stark visual effect of Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Dust

Bowl Oklahoma and California migrant life, the timbre of Greek epics, the

rhythms of King James Bible, the refrains of American folk music, and the

biological impetus of his and Edward F. Rickett’s ecological phalanx, or a group-

man, theory. (DeMott xi)

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Steinbeck’s imagination transformed these sources into a synthesis of his own

individual style. In The Grapes of Wrath Steinbeck uses “a contrapuntal structure, which

alternates short lyrical chapters of exposition and background pertinent to the migrants as a

group” (DeMott xi) (every chapter with an odd number with exceptions of chapters 12 and

14) “with the long narrative chapters of the Joad’s family dramatic exodus to California”

(DeMott xi) (every chapter with an even number with the exception of chapter 13). The

chapters that belong to the fictional world of the Joad family are slow-paced and involve a

longer narrative that advances the plot of the book and imitates the movement of the Joad’s

family to California. His shorter interchapters also work as pace changers and shed light on

the condition of American migrants during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression.

Steinbeck wrote that he wanted “the reader to be able to keep [the general and particular

chapters] separate in his mind” (qtd in DeMott xii). He wrote the intercalary chapters to

“hit the reader below the belt. With the rhythms and symbols of poetry one can get into a

reader - open him up and while he is open introduce things on a [sic] intellectual level

which he would not or could not receive unless he were opened up” (Steinbeck qtd in

DeMott xii).

The book is not narrated from the first person point of view, however the details

and stylistic devices like allusions, parallels, and Biblical themes make the novel tonally

personal. It was Steinbeck’s goal for his novel to be a good book that would move people

with its integrity. He wrote: “This must be a good book. It simply must. I haven’t any

choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted - slow but sure, piling

detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing

emerges” (Steinbeck qtd in DeMott xiii). Moreover, his direct involvement with the plight

of America’s Dust Bowl migrants in the second half of the 1930s makes the book honest,

as many details are drawn from his personal experience (DeMott xiii). “I tried to write this

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book the way lives are being lived not the way books are written” (Steinbeck qtd in

DeMott xiii). Steinbeck claims that he wanted to make the novel participatory and for the

reader to take something from it depending on the reader’s own depth and hollowness

(DeMott xiv).

The second novel to be analyzed, On the Road by Jack Kerouac has been

considered as one of classic American novels, while it has also been thought to be

inscrutable and undeserved of being called writing by others (Hunt, xxx, xxxvi). Ann

Charters writes that it seems that Kerouac had spent the first part of his career trying to

create a book like On the Road and the rest of his life making people to forget about it after

its publishing (ix).

On the Road follows the story of Sal Paradise, a young writer who is searching for

new experiences in the form of travelling. He gives up his obligations (like finishing a

book) to go on the road with or to meet Dean Moriarty, who would bring him a great deal

of joy and adventure as well as sadness and trouble. Based on the real events of Jack

Kerouac’s life, the book offers a glance at the 1950s America and its people who try to

find their place in life. “Still” Sal is infatuated with the chaos, that is, Dean Moriarty and

the community of friends they share, and readily gives up his planned life and aspirations

to follow his new friend across America. He tries to find his happiness in spontaneity and

experimentations with drugs and behavior that is uncharacteristic for him. On several

occasions in the novel Sal realizes that his search for something knew, what Dean calls

“IT”, does not work for him and it does not appear as something worth striving for.

However, only it is only the last trip with Dean that helps Sal realize that Dean is not the

right companion for him and his adventures.

On the Road is the most famous and successful books of Jack Kerouac however,

with the success came an intense interest in his persona and confusion about which

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character, Sal or Dean, is based of Jack Kerouac himself (Charters viii). Ann Charters

writes that after the publication of the book, reporters were expecting to interview a person

much like Kerouac’s character Dean Moriarty, spontaneous and wild, and to learn about

his explanation of the term “beat” that was connected to the Beat Generation (viii – ix).

The reporters did not want to accept that Jack Kerouac was Sal Paradise in the book, “a

writer between his trips on the road” (Charters ix). Kerouac had spent 7 years on the road

before in 1951 when it took him three weeks to start and finish the manuscript of On the

Road (Charters xix). He met Neal Cassady, the model of the character of Dean Moriarty,

in 1946, and in 1947 he decided to make his first cross-country trip. At that time he was

writing another book called The Town and The City but his road adventures overwhelmed

him so much that he tried to base a new book on them shortly after finishing his first book

(Charters xiii). Charters adds that writing On the Road was one of the most frustrating

experiences in Kerouac’s life as he struggled to find a way to put his thoughts and feelings

into fiction and had to restart writing the novel several times. Searching for ultimate

freedom of expression in his novel, he used what he called a “factualist” way of handling

his ideas, imitating Theodor Dreiser (Charters xiv). However, he reached a dead end in his

first manuscript of On the Road, feeling “emptiness and even falseness” about it because

its style did not allow him to express “the reverent mad feelings” that he was able to

execute in his first novel (Charters xiv). The unexpected arrival of Dean Moriarty’s

prototype Neal Cassady at Kerouac’s sister’s house in 1948 became an excuse for the

writer to postpone his writing project and go on the road with Cassady for the first time.

Later this experience would be fictionalized in Part Two of On the Road (Charters xiv).

In 1949 Kerouac made another attempt on writing On the Road, envisioning it as a

quest novel with a jailed character who after his release would go on the road in search for

“inheritance, incorruptible, and that fadeth not away” (Bunuyan qtd in Charters xv).

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Shortly after he became dissatisfied with the direction, the novel was going; to him it

“lacked freshness and spontaneity of his journal descriptions of jazz” (Charters x). Once

again, Kerouac put his project on hold in favor of his adventures with Cassady in San

Francisco, a period of time that later became Part Three of final version of On the Road.

Less than a year later, Cassidy took Kerouac on another trip to Mexico that became a basis

of Part Four of the novel. Ann Charters writes that “Kerouac had been struggling for years

to invent plots and characters for his ‘road book’” (Charters xviii) and he was secretly

upset that his writer friends had been incorporating real life events and people into their

works. Witnessing his friends being published and receiving big advances for their books,

Kerouac admitted that he could not “create plausible backgrounds for his characters” and

“catch the thing about it that he wanted that way” (Charters xviii). Kerouac claimed: “I’m

just going to write it as it happened” (Kerouac qtd in Charters xviii). With an

encouragement of his wife Joan Kerouac, Kerouac decided to write his road novel as if

telling her what had happened on the cross-country trips before their marriage, using the

first person narration, […] dramatizing the emotional effect of his road experiences had on

him” (Charters xix).

Kerouac liked the idea of typing nonstop to get the “kickwriting” style he had been

striving for (Charters xix). By “kickwriting”, Kerouac meant Cassady’s prose style in the

letters he received from him, “first person singular arias composed in fits of soul-bearing

frenzy” (Carden 96). Afraid to lose his verbal flow Kerouac taped together the sheets of

drawing paper to write without the interruption of reloading papers (Charters xix). Kerouac

was not only inspired by autobiographical narratives of his friends like Holmes and

Cassady but his study of The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald “had shown him the value of

inventing a sympathetic narrator to tell the story of an American hero who fled his past to

embrace what he imagined was the freedom of his future” (Charters xx). He blended

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fiction and autobiography, and quoted sections of Neal Cassady’s letters verbatim,

reflecting his own feelings. Finally, while writing On the Road Kerouac found the true

subject of his books: “the story of his own search for a place as an outsider in America”

(Charters xx).

As can be seen, both Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck sought for an accurate

depiction of life and the events that they have witnessed. As DeMott mentions, “many

American authors found that established novelistic traditions and fictional models do not

suit their sensibilities” (x) and authors often merge their own vision and experience with

established narrative forms (x). By using innovative writing techniques, they created the

right pace for their stories. Steinbeck used fragmented narrative in The Grapes of Wrath,

intertwining chapters that educate the reader about the hardships of migrants, the

conditions they find themselves in, and serve more as a report with chapters that narrate

the journey of the fictional Joad family based on a real family of migrants and the

experiences of many other families who had to cross the country in hopes of a better

future. Kerouac’s stream-of-consciousness and nonstop writing provided On the Road with

the right speed for the novel. The novel progresses quickly much like its character Sal

Paradise who immerses himself in the chaos and hastiness of road trips, providing only

description of events without little explanation of what is happening, thus, showing an

authentic experience of how Sal and Jack Kerouac himself experienced the freedom of the

road. While both authors witnessed different roads that they reflect on in their respective

novels but they also manage to convey reflections of what it feels like to be on the road. As

mentioned earlier, Kerouac found his inspiration in his travel experience of following his

friend across America by automobile. John Steinbeck went on the research trips with

Thomas Collins, a “source, guide, discussant and chronicler of accurate migrant

information”, investigating field conditions (DeMott xxii). Albeit, Steinbeck did not travel

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with a migrant family from Oklahoma to California, as many legends about the source of

inspiration for The Grapes of Wrath state, Steinbeck and his wife did follow Route 66 on a

car trip from Chicago to Los Gatos in 1937 (DeMott xxi – xxii).

3.2. Mobility and Its Elements

As mentioned previously, in their novels, Steinbeck and Kerouac reflected on an authentic

experience of travelling, as moving through space plays an important role in The Grapes of

Wrath and On the Road. To put it simply, the characters engage with mobility in order to

reach a desired outcome of their personal search, thus, they spend the majority of the time

on the road passing through the American landscape, aspiring to reach California.

Discussing American mobility, Alexandra Ganser quotes Deborah Paes de Barros who

talks about the importance of road literature in a North American cultural context:

The literature of the road is one of the most pre-eminent American literary tropes.

From early frontier narratives to late postmodern literature, the road story has

figured significantly. In a sense, to be “on the road,” is concurrent with notions of

Manifest Destiny and the Puritan “errand into the wilderness”. The road is

resonant within the concept of nation building; it concerns evolution and

becoming and is consequently compatible with the Enlightenment idea of

progress […]. The road story, then, is almost a manifesto of American cultural

consciousness; it is the mythic representation of history and ideology. (Paes de

Barros qtd in Ganser 14)

“The culture of the highway” resonates with an eagerness to grasp “the

psychological impact of travel” in written form (Paes de Barros 229). Patton writes that

“the myth of the road is an old trope in American culture” when talking about the road-

themed blues songs (281). Additionally, he suggests that “the core myth of the road was

tied to myths of freedom and escape, in both a social and a spiritual sense” (281), where

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“the road” usually refers to the road to the West connecting it to “the classic lines of

American myths of the frontier and manifest destiny” (Patton 281) that revolve around the

belief of inevitability of expansion through out the American land. Undoubtedly, the

reasoning behind the characters’ movement varies greatly and it is not one fixed direction,

which is followed by different writers and their characters put in the road setting.

However, novels under study in this thesis have a common narrative of mobility which

greatly strengthens the reading of The Grapes of Wrath as a road novel alongside a more

pronounced road novel like On the Road and mutually benefit the readings of both novels

in the genre.

Kerouac’s novel explores racing the American roads for freedom and for the sake

of moving while, the characters trying to find an elusive “IT”, what Dean Moriarty calls

living in the moment. Steinbeck’s characters have set out on the road to relocate and find

the jobs that will help them to settle down again and retain the status of Americans versus

“Okies” – the migrant family who is not welcomed in the lands of California. Therefore,

the biggest detail connecting the two works is of course the mode of achieving the dream,

the road that takes the characters of The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road on their quest

for it. In On the Road, Sal and other characters search for freedom and the possibilities that

the road offers echoes the determination in movement and the search for a better life of the

Joad family from The Grapes of Wrath.

Therefore, corresponding narrative of mobility in The Grapes of Wrath and On the

Road, is the quest “one of the oldest forms of narrating human movement” (Ganser 82).

According to Delia Falconer, in the context of the quest, the road “promises progress along

a fixed spatio-temporal path toward a future goal. The route map, with its narrative of

beginning and end, guarantees the future by subordinating the presence” (Falconer qtd in

Ganser 82). Ganser adds that the future or “goal-orientedness” is the main characteristic of

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the quest, “whose destination - a person or place, the attainment of answers […] is

imagined as granting social improvement or personal regeneration and the possibility to

redefine oneself” (82).

The Grapes of Wrath explores a movement west in which the Joad family

“discover[s] the human power of indwelling” (Wyatt, The Fall into Eden 148). Despite the

reoccurring disenchantment where the road takes the family in contrast to the fantasy

where it could have led them, the loss of faith is only ephemeral and the Joad family is still

moving: “We’ll be – together on the road” (The Grapes of Wrath 99). To quote Wyatt,

“locating the first third of the action on the road is the book’s major imaginative act”

(Wyatt 148). The road theme is indeed foreshadowed right from the beginning of the book

when Tom Joad returns from prison and converses with a transport truck driver who states

that “[…] the road gets into a guy. He’s got to do somepin” (The Grapes of Wrath 13). In

contrast to Steinbeck’s previous works where he cultivates the image of California as the

“valley of the world”, the book begins outside of California where the characters start the

journey the east of Eden (Wyatt 148). “Only the unbalanced sky showed the approach of

dawn, no horizon to the west, and a line to the east” (The Grapes of Wrath 77). Steinbeck

depicts the act of movement in various ways: not only does he portray the movement of

people and “the emergent culture of the car and its resultant highways” (Paes de Barros

228) but he also shows nature and animals that also move in search of home and a place to

belong to. Wyatt mentions the author Peter Lisca who argues that Steinbeck moralizes the

necessity of motion in The Grapes of Wrath (Wyatt, The Fall into Eden 148).

Absolutely everything is moving in The Grapes of Wrath, as everyone tries to

escape difficult environmental conditions and find another place to belong to. One of the

animals mentioned in the novel is a land turtle. Steinbeck dedicates the entire Chapter 3 to

a description of the turtle’s struggle to cross the highway embankment. The whole chapter

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can be examined as a metaphor to the struggle of the migrants to get to California. To

quote the novel:

And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing,

dragging his high-domed shell over the grass: His hard legs and yellow-nailed

feet threshed slowly through the grass, not really walking, but boosting and

dragging his shell along. (The Grapes of Wrath 17)

The turtle crawling to the embankment is an obvious metaphor of the Joad family’s

preparations to go on the road. The turtle’s shell can be interpreted as the family’s over-

packed Hudson sedan car that slows down the Joads’ movement due to the number of

people and things they have taken with them. According to Timmerman, “the turtle’s

“horny beak”” (The Grapes of Wrath 17) “and his “fierce, humorous eyes””(The Grapes of

Wrath 17) “resemble both the grim determination and the quick capacity for joy in the

migrants” (Timmerman 107). Crossing the embankment may symbolize the family getting

on the road and struggling to turn on its feet, migrants’ struggle to get to California: “[a]s

the embankment grew steeper and steeper, the more frantic were the efforts of the land

turtle. Pushing hind legs strained and slipped, boosting the shell along, and the horny head

protruded as far as the neck could stretch” (The Grapes of Wrath 17-18)

Later, when the turtle gets on to the road, rests, and then moves to cross the

highway, the approaching cars could symbolize obstacles that migrants have to face trying

to find work. The first car that avoids hitting the turtle can be interpreted as the utility-

supplied camps that try to help families that struggle to find a job. The following car that

hits the turtle on purpose can be seen as the California deputies that try to harass migrants

and send them away from California: “[h]is front wheel struck the edge of the shell,

flipped the turtle like a tiddly-wink, spun it like a coin, and rolled it off the highway” (The

Grapes of Wrath 18-19). Finally, the turtle entering the dust road (as an opposite to the

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highway) and still looking ahead can be interpreted as the Joad family hitting the rock

bottom at the end of the novel but who remain hopeful despite the hardshipl: “lying on its

back, the turtle was tight in its shell for a long time. But at last its legs waved in the air,

reaching for something to pull it over” (The Grapes of Wrath 19). As Timmerman states,

“the turtle’s instinctive sense of direction toward the south-west, even after being upset by

Tom’s boot, resembles the Okies’ dogged determination to arrive in California despite the

obstacles in their way” (107). Tom picks up the turtle later in the novel for his little brother

and the turtle struggles to escape but eventually Tom lets it go. “‘Where the hell you s’pose

he’s goin’?’ said Joad. ‘I seen turtles all my life. They’re always goin’ someplace. They

always seem to want to get there’” (The Grapes of Wrath 51). Tom’s description of the

turtle can be paralleled with a stereotype in which Americans are always thought to be on

the move, trying to get somewhere, reimbursing the idea of starting over anywhere and

anytime. Lisca reads the turtle as “an embodiment of the “indomitable life force” that

“drives the Joads”” as “life here does seems equipped and therefore perhaps intended for

motion rather than fixity” (Lisca qtd in Wyatt, The Fall Into Eden 148). As Steinbeck

writes:

The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and

the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog's coat, and foxtails

to tangle in a horse's fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep's wool; sleeping

life waiting to be spread and dispersed, every seed armed with an appliance of

dispersal, twisting darts and parachutes for the wind, little spears and balls of tiny

thorns, and all waiting for animals and for the wind, for a man's trouser cuff or

the hem of a woman's skirt, all passive but armed with appliances of activity,

still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement. (The Grapes of Wrath 17)

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Thus, even nature is ready to move and Steinbeck shows it through the description of

various plants that are catching on both animate and inanimate objects. Another animal

that helps the reader and the characters to realize that the whole country is moving is a cat.

When Tom Joad returns home to Oklahoma, after being imprisoned for slaughtering a

man, he notices that in each house he passes, no one is home. Former preacher Jim Casy,

whom Tom meets on his way to his parents’ home, explains to him how the landowners

forced the farmers out of their land. As Tom’s parents are nowhere to be seen, both men

decide to rest in the empty house for the night when “a lean gray cat came sneaking out of

the barn and crept through the cotton plants to the end of the porch. It leaped silently up to

the porch and crept low-belly toward the men” (The Grapes of Wrath 49). The cat’s

movements are very cautious, much like the movements of Tom and Casy later in the

novel, shown when the two are hiding in the field from a police patrol that is trying to find

trespassers on the land that no longer belongs to the farmers. The cat also helps Tom to

realize that not only his family was gone from their house but everyone else was gone too:

“Whyn't that cat jus’ move in with some neighbors— with the Rances. How come nobody

ripped some lumber off this house? Ain’t been nobody here for three-four months, an’

nobody’s stole no lumber” (The Grapes of Wrath 49).

However, while plants and animals are ready to move, the human movement is

reluctant. Despite the fact that the family is determined to make it in California, “the

motion into which the Joads are propelled may be less a behavior affirmed than a condition

they must adapt” (Wyatt, The Fall Into Eden 148). John Steinbeck heavily intertwines his

narration with the symbolism of movement. For instance, during a prayer before a meal in

Joad’s house, Granma asks Reverend Jim Casy to say grace and connect it to the family’s

trip to California:

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“I been thinkin’,” he said. “I been in the hills, thinkin”, almost you might say like

Jesus went into the wilderness to think His way out of a mess of troubles.” “Pu-

raise Gawd!” Granma said, and the preacher glanced over at her in surprise.

“Seems like Jesus got all messed up with troubles, and He couldn't figure

nothing” out, an” He got to feelin’ what the hell good is it all, an’ what’s the use

fightin’ an’ figurin’. Got tired, got good an’ tired, an’ His sperit all wore out. Jus’

about come to the conclusion, the hell with it. An’ so He went off into the

wilderness.” (The Grapes of Wrath 94)

Through the prayer, Jim Casy resonates with the situation that many Americans faced

during the Great Depression. Being forced of the land, the families have to move without

much time to figure out the process of the actual moving and the plan for their future life.

When Casy asks the family if he can join them on the road, he explains his motivation for

moving by stating that where people are on the road, he is going to be with them (The

Grapes of Wrath 66). The family is very welcoming and ready to accept another fellow

traveller, provided that there is room left in the car:

The preacher sighed. “I’ll go anyways,” he said. “Somepin’s happening. I went

up an’ I looked, an’ the houses is all empty, an’ the lan’ is empty, an’ this whole

country is empty. I can’t stay here no more. I got to go where the folks is goin’.

I’ll work in the fiel’s, an’ maybe I'll be happy.” (The Grapes of Wrath 108-109)

Through Casy’s reasoning Steinbeck portrays the extremes of desperation for the

movement. The former man of God, he loses his belief system and faith in God and

individuality whilst reinforcing his belief system in unity of mankind.

The power of the dream to travel to California clashes with the nostalgia of home

and the fear of the uncertainty. For instance, Grampa, who mentions his fantasy of sitting

under the tree eating grapes in the green land of California more than once in the book,

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refuses to leave the Joad’s home as soon as family realizes there is no point of waiting and

they should go.

“You go right on along. Me—I'm stayin’. I give her a goin’-over all night mos’ly.

This here’s my country. I b’long here. An’ I don’t give a goddamn if they’s

oranges an’ grapes crowdin’ a fella outa bed even. I ain’t a-goin’. This country

ain’t no good, but it’s my country. No, you all go ahead. I’ll jus’ stay right here

where I b’long." (The Grapes of Wrath 129)

Grampa’s choice to stay still and not to move forward sets further the uncertainty of what

the family is coming to. Engagement with the road is equally exciting and terrifying. The

road is unknown but it is also a promise of a better life. However, for the Joad family

setting out on the road also means leaving home. Thus, when the family is getting ready to

load their truck and start moving, it becomes hard to break the chains of past and comfort

and start moving towards the unknown:

And the movement of the family stopped. They stood about, reluctant to make the

first active move to go. They were afraid, now that the time had come—afraid in

the same way Grampa was afraid. […] And still the family stood about like

dream walkers, their eyes focused panoramically, seeing no detail, but the whole

dawn, the whole land, the whole texture of the country at once. (The Grapes of

Wrath 131)

Finally, Tom is the first one to brush off an overcoming feeling of loss of the home for the

time being and remind his family that they have to move. The characters believe that “they

have only temporarily given in to the road” (The Fall into Eden 148). To quote the novel,

“folks out lonely on the road, folks with no lan’, no home to go to. They got to have some

kind of home” (The Grapes of Wrath 65). According to Wyatt, “the novel never delivers

more than a momentary stay against the confusion of moving on” (Wyatt, The Fall into

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Eden 149). In the manner of previously mentioned scholars, he mentions how the

American man is always on the way: “[m]an is the thing always on the way, and “way”

becomes the word that here takes the emerging sense of the finality of death and

uncertainty of life” (The Fall into Eden 149). Right in the beginning of their journey, Al,

Tom’s younger brother, notices that Ma Joad looks ahead of the road but does not really

pays attention to it and he confronts her if she is scared:

“No, I ain’t. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. It’s too much—livin’ too many

lives. Up ahead they’s a thousan’ lives we might live, but when it comes, it’ll

on’y be one. If I go ahead on all of ‘em, it's too much. You got to live ahead

‘cause you’re so young, but—it’s jus’ the road goin’ by for me. (The Grapes of

Wrath 144)

As the journey west continues, Reverend Casy discards the hope for an end (Wyatt, The

Fall into Eden 149). “What we comin’ to? Seems to me we don't never come to nothin’.

Always on the way. Always goin’ and goin’ (The Grapes of Wrath 148). The experience of

the way comes to dominate the imaginations of the major characters – Tom, Casy and

Ma”, Wyatt states (The Fall into Eden 149):

They’s movement now. People moving. We know why, an’ we know how.

Movin’ ‘cause they got to. That's why folks always move. Movin’ ‘cause they

want somepin better’n what they got. An’ that’s the on’y way they’ll ever git it.

Wantin’ it an’ needin’ it, they’ll go out an’ git it. It’s bein’ hurt that makes folks

mad to fightin’. (The Grapes of Wrath 144)

Dispossession of home divides “the way” into both a positive and negative thing.

On the one hand, the Joads’ journey west “is a moving record of losses” (Railton 32): they

are forced off their land, thus, lose their home; Grampa and Granma die before seeing

California, Casy is killed for his beliefs, and Noah and Connie leave the family; Tom is

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also forced to leave his family. Although on the road Ma reaches the point where “she

seemed to know” that the families expectations were “all a dream” (The Grapes of Wrath

196), the Joads continue to believe in their dreams (Railton 32). On the other hand, the

Joads also set out on an inward journey and here, the losses they have experienced on their

way west, transform their movement into “a piligrimage toward the prospect of a new

consciousness” (Railton 32). Homelessness and suffering become opportunities for

spiritual growth (Railton 32). Watching his family suffering and Casy being killed in front

of his eyes, Tom sets out on a personal journey to see his country held responsible for the

crimes against its people. At the end of the novel, Ma Joad, who has always put her family

first, finds a new way to describe her life: “Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now.

It’s anybody” (The Grapes of Wrath 525).

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road “presents North American roads of the late 1940s as

granting deliriously liberating social, sexual, philosophical, and spatial freedoms” (Larson

35). Naturally, the book is very appealing to the readers who view the road as a freeing

mechanism. However, as expected, this one-sided reading remains surprising when one

considers how melancholic the setting of the novel can be and the rejection the novel

portrays along its roads (Larson 35). Like Steinbeck’s novel, On the Road also pursues two

roads or two ways simultaneously. Kerouac’s characters are “torn and consumed with the

balance between being on the road and settling down” (Ording 81). To quote the novel:

Here I was at the end of America-no more land-and now there was nowhere to go

but back. I determined at least to make my trip a circular one: I decided then and

there to go to Hollywood and back through Texas to see my bayou gang; then the

rest be damned. (On the Road 70)

The characters seem out of control, wishing to desert “the responsibility of deliberative

action, preferring instead to be swept away, at least until the end of the book, when Sal

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makes a decision” (Ording 81-82). Thus, the characters’ road is themed dually. The first

theme deals with Sal and Dean’s travels and the time spent together. Both try to articulate

what the American Dream means to them; they reject middle-class values and properties,

often replacing them with alcohol, drugs, sex and jazz (Ording 82). Another theme that

runs deep in the novel is Sal’s nostalgia for America’s small-town innocence and family

life, “which he often describes in terms of lost fathers or his desire to find a wife and settle

down” (Ording 82).

Unlike the Joad family who were compelled to take the road because of the bad

economy and not having other choice, Sal in On the Road is triggered to go on the road

after meeting Dean Moriarty, “trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent –

sideburned hero of the snowy West” (On the Road 4). Dean walks in Sal’s life not long

after Sal has split up with his wife and “gotten over a serious illness” that has made him

feel “that everything is dead” (On the Road 3). Sal is drawn to the free spirit of Dean

Moriarty and his “criminality” that “was a yea- saying overburst of American joy; it was

Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-

coming” (On the Road 9). Sal compares Dean to his New York friends “who were in the

negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or

political or psychoanalytical reasons” (9-10). Dean, in contrast,

just raced in society, eager for bread and love; he didn’t care one way or the

other, “so long’s I can get that lil ole gal with that lil sumpin down there tween

her legs, boy,” and “so long's we can eat, son, y’ear me? I’m hungry, I’m

starving, let’s eat right now!”-and off we’d rush to eat, whereof, as saith

Ecclesiastes, “It is your portion under the sun”. (On the Road 10)

In the beginning of the journey, Sal’s aunt warns him about Dean bringing trouble in Sal’s

life but Sal “could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at [his] young age”

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(On the Road 10). Sal argues that he is a young writer and wants to take off (On the Road

10). As he puts it, “somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything;

somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me” (On the Road 10).

Sal starts his journey to the West alone, making plans to meet Dean and the whole

gang of friends in Denver and later travel to San Francisco. His journey begins with a low

start and travelling the road brings Sal annoyance rather than happiness. He chooses to

follow a “red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod to Los Angeles” (On the

Road 11). According to Weinreich, the road as “American thing” presents “the idea, or the

faith, that certain images, that certain postures, expressions and movements, framed and

allowed to hold a moment of time, can embody very nearly the whole of a country’s

identity, or its fantasy, its received but still felt and imagined self” (Weinreich 196). While

his plan is to travel until the city of Ely located in the state of Nevada, it crumbles when

hitchhiking brings him north “instead of the-so-longed-for west” (On the Road 11). “It was

my dream that screwed up, the stupid hearthside idea that it would be wonderful to follow

one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes” (On the Road

12). ). He is forced to travel to New York and restart his journey. However, according to

Larson, this failed try to travel by the fixed on the map Route 6 teaches Sal a lesson

(Larson 40). To quote Larson: “he returns home with this lesson […] and makes another

start across the country, this time with more flexibility, spontaneity, and heterogeneity in

his outlook than his previous “hearthside” ideals” (Larson 40).

Sal’s pursuit of the West becomes a fixed and almost an obsessive idea, as if

nothing else could ever bring him happiness but travelling to unknown territory:

I wanted to go west and here I’ve been all day and into the night going up and

down, north and south, like something that can't get started. And I swore I’d be in

Chicago tomorrow, and made sure of that, taking a bus to Chicago, spending

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most of my money, and didn't give a damn, just as long as I'd be in Chicago

tomorrow. (On the Road 11)

Sal calls the bus trip to Chicago “an ordinary bus trip” (12), signifying that travelling as a

passenger of a bus unlike as a hitchhiker on a car or a truck is extremely boring. After

arriving in Chicago, Sal is finally entering into the West. Running out of money, Sal gets a

ride in a dynamite truck and for the first time sees the place, where Route 6 “intersects

Route 66 before they both shoot west for incredible distances” (13). He gets another ride to

Rock Island and while driving per request of the woman who owns the car he gets a look at

the Mississippi River: “And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi

River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw

body of America itself because it washes it up” (13). Sal gets another ride, this time from

the truck driver, and for the first time he feels happy:

And the new truckdriver was as crazy as the other and yelled just as much, and all

I had to do was lean back and roll on. Now I could see Denver looming ahead of

me like the Promised Land, way out there beneath the stars, across the prairie of

Iowa and the plains of Nebraska, and I could see the greater vision of San

Francisco beyond, like jewels in the night. (On the Road 15)

In the midst of travelling in the city of Des Moines, Sal experiences a moment of becoming

someone else, as the American road changes him,

I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life,

the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from

home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing

the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and

footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling

and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t

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scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a

haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing

line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's

why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon. (On the Road

15)

The highway confronts Sal with a great number of different people and “he loosens his

grip on his own sense of self” (Larson 41). Evidently, Sal gains a new perspective on

travelling in America. Using Ann Brigham’s term, Sal incorporates himself into the

country, when travelling the land in search of freedom (Brigham, American Road

Narratives n.p.). Sal leaves the comfort of his aunt’s apartment (responding to social

tension) and relies on the promise of mobility, which provides him with the new

perspective on location.

According to Larson, for Sal Paradise, the interstate highways signify “a promise of

new frontiers for personal desire” that makes On the Road a “kind of quintessential

American road text” (38). Sal’s travelling desire is a contrast to his domestic life, where he

finds himself living under his aunt’s rules, working on his novel and participating in family

gatherings that include “gaunt men and women with the old Southern soil in their eyes,

talking in low, whining voices about the weather, the crops, and the general weary

recapitulation of who had a baby, who got a new house, and so on” (On the Road 99). In

contrast to this predictable life, every road trip seems to offer Sal new possibilities “in

perceptions of time and space, personal relationships, and sensory ecstasies” (Larsen 38).

As Kerouac puts it:

And before me was the great raw bulge and bulk of my American continent;

somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy New York was throwing up its cloud of

dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and

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California is white like washlines and emptyheaded-at least that's what I thought

then. (On the Road 71)

Moreover, Sal is able to experience freedom of economic movement as the road

offers him certain shared structures like “hitchhiking, staying or travelling with

acquaintances using drive-away cars” (Larsen 38). In addition, hitchhiking offers him a

possibility of learning about the culture of his country. During one of the hitchhikes, Sal

gets to ride with a cowboy, who shares his collective memories of the Great Depression,

thus Kerouac incorporates the struggles of the migrants of 1930s into his novel, sharing a

cultural experience of the past:

“During the depression,” said the cowboy to me, “I used to hop freights at least

once a month. In those days you’d see hundreds of men riding a flatcar or in a

boxcar, and they weren't just bums, they were all kinds of men out of work and

going from one place to another and some of them just wandering. It was like that

all over the West. […] Why in the middle nineteen thirties this place wasn't

nothing but a big dustcloud as far as the eye could see. You couldn't breathe. The

ground was black. I was here in those days. They can give Nebraska back to the

Indians far as I’m concerned. I hate this damn place more than' any place in the

world. Montana’s my home now-Missoula. You come up there sometime and see

God's country.” (On the Road 18)

Additionally, with Dean, Sal is able to free himself in a sense of speed. Dean is a reckless

driver who drives at ninety-mile-an-hour speeds (On the Road 50) and though Sal

understands the need for restrictions and the law, “his desire for escape is stronger”

(Larson 40). Whilst travelling, “the protective road where nobody would know us” (On the

Road 203), as Sal calls it, offers Sal, Dean, and their friends “spatial anonymity” that

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“gives them the ability to flee social responsibilities, communities and laws at a moment’s

notice” (Larson 40).

However, the different freedoms that the highway allows its travellers also act as

something that greatly complicates the travellers’ lives. Along side freedom of endless fun,

Kerouac includes the moments of “melancholy, fear, guilt – culminating in a kind of road-

abandonment in the novel’s end” (Larson 48). As suggested by Larson, interpreting a novel

as only a positive take on American road is misreading it (48). “Instead, Kerouac balances

this by asserting the confounding limitations of a deterritorialized life lived on the

highway” (Larson 48). The journey for Sal usually ends up in returning home and getting

off the road functions as a solution to his disappointment. “I had my home to go to, my

place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in

there somewhere too” (On the Road 97). Moreover, Sal feels guilty over spontaneity of the

motion and what he escapes. With every new opportunity for a road trip, Sal’s excitement

is followed by a sense of melancholy of leaving something behind. When he leaves his

friends in New Orleans, Sal wonders, “what is that feeling when you’re driving away from

people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? – it’s the too-huge

world vaulting us, and it's good-by. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath

the skies” (On the Road 141). In addition, Sal shows guilt over constantly leaving his aunt,

choosing the adventures with Dean instead: “my aunt said I was wasting my time hanging

around with Dean and his gang. I knew that was wrong, too. Life is life, and kind is kind.

What I wanted was to take one more magnificent trip to the West Coast and get back in

time for the spring semester in school” (On the Road 116). Dean, simultaneously married

to two women and having parental responsibilities, constantly replaces his families with

living in a moment, what makes Sal to start gradually realizing that the road pulls families

apart.

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Later in the novel, Sal completely loses the feeling of excitement of the motion that

gets replaced with repulsion. Dean’s crazy drive from Denver to Chicago full of crashes

and the near death experiences finally shows Sal that the life on the road is out of control

(Larson 51). “I couldn’t take it any more. […] All that old road of the past unreeling

dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached

in the nightmare day” (On the Road 213).

It is evident that On the Road balances “these two cultural tendencies of

containment and promiscuity, without one necessarily superseding the other. It aims to

locate an erotics of freedom along the spaces of the American roads, while being matched

by its own impulses to regulate and chasten” (Larson 38).

As it was explored earlier, both The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road have an

undeniable feel of movement and progression. It can be argued that those automobiles and

the roads that the characters of both novels possess and travel on can be treated as the

characters as well. For instance, Steinbeck dedicates several passages to Highway (Route)

66 that plays an important part in lives of people who find themselves on the road, fleeing

terrible conditions and homelessness. To quote the novel:

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from

the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership, from the desert's slow northward

invasion, from the twisting winds that howl up out of Texas, from the floods that

bring no richness to the land and steal what little richness is there. From all of

these the people are in flight, and they come into 66 from the tributary side roads,

from the wagon tracks and the rutted country roads. 66 is the mother road, the

road of flight. (The Grapes of Wrath 137)

Neither author economizes on the descriptions of these elements of mobility reaffirming

their importance in the text. Using a stylistic device like personification (according to

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Oxford Dictionary, it is “the attribution of a personal nature or human characteristics to

something nonhuman, or the representation of an abstract quality in human form”),

Steinbeck and Kerouac add a necessary for the narration level of speed to their respective

novels.

Marking the beginning of his road journey, Tom Joad hitchhikes in order to reach

his home in Oklahoma, “along the white road that waved gently, like a ground swell” (The

Grapes of Wrath 12). In Chapter 5 of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck offers an

explanation why farmer families have to leave their land, describing landowners and

faceless banks as well as the machines that are ready to destroy all the homes on their way:

The tractors came over the roads and into the fields, great crawlers moving like

insects, having the incredible strength of insects. They crawled over the ground,

laying the track and rolling on it and picking it up. Diesel tractors, puttering while

they stood idle; they thundered when they moved, and then settled down to a

droning roar. Snubnosed monsters, raising the dust and sticking their snouts into

it, straight down the country, across the country, through fences, through

dooryards, in and out of gullies in straight lines. (The Grapes of Wrath 40-41)

Comparing tractors to insects and adding the characteristic of monstrosity, shows the

horrific scale of destruction that is about to happen to the farmers’ properties.

The Joads’ Hudson truck becomes a metal member of the family as it carries them

towards their destination. “And the truck crawled slowly through the dust toward the

highway and the west” (The Grapes of Wrath 133). In addition to personifying the cars that

carry families to the west, the text also shows the struggle that these families are going

through. “Cars limping along 66 like wounded things, panting and struggling. Too hot,

loose connections, loose bearings, rattling bodies” (The Grapes of Wrath 141).

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In On the Road, Kerouac attributes human characteristics to elements of mobility as

when describing the American land during one of the road trips of Sal and Dean: “we got

ready to cross the groaning continent again” (On the Road 116-117). Moreover, depending

on the way Sal feels about travelling the road, Kerouac switches the adjectives to resemble

the change in Sal’s attitude: “The road changed too: humpy in the middle, with soft

shoulders and a ditch on both sides about four feet deep, so that the truck bounced and

teetered from one side of the road to the other” (On the Road). It also becomes lonely and

dark, the senseless nightmare road, whilst Dean offers more up-beat descriptions: “"What's

your road, man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road” (On

the Road 229).

Summing up this section, mobility and its elements play a major role in carrying

out the plot of the novels under study. The pursuit of happiness becomes more achievable

for the characters of both The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road as soon as the characters

are introduced to the idea of moving and the elements of mobility such as the road and the

automobile. However, despite different reasoning behind their journeys, the characters in

both texts come to the conclusion, that the motion of the road brings the characters only a

temporary solution to their problems.

3.3. Versions of the American Dream in The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road

When the writers of the twentieth century take their characters on the American road, it

becomes hard to avoid the presence of the American Dream and the characters’ quest for

achieving it and/or suffer a setback obtaining it. Coined during the Great Depression, the

term carries out the different meanings, as it was mentioned previously, and it goes without

saying how much the people of the 1930s relied on a belief in a better and happier life with

the land to keep practicing self-reliance on and opportunity to work. Despite the fact that

the American Dream is not real but a product of the collective imagination and a myth,

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people needed it to keep on moving forward and perhaps, in that period of time people

needed it the most. Both Steinbeck and Kerouac paint their characters as almost

delusionally optimistic about what awaits them on the road going West and the belief in

the American Dream, however at the same time, they also portray the ways in which the

Dream is fulfilled and is not. As mentioned earlier in the last section of the theoretical

framework, there is an endless quantity of representations of the American Dream as they

are products of imagination of many Americans. However, in this thesis, the following

expressions are chosen as representations of the American Dream of the novels under

study: the fantasy of a perfect life, the quest to achieve something beyond the reach, a

home of one’s own, a society without poverty or crime and the impetus of personal

transformation.

The fantasy of a perfect life is an ultimate fulfillment of the American Dream as it

can include its different variations mentioned above. For the characters of The Grapes of

Wrath, a perfect life concerns owning property and working hard. Especially in the case of

the older generations, the fantasy is extremely reassuring. For instance, the matriarch of the

family, Ma Joad, cautiously dreams of the rich land of California where the family can get

jobs and have a small white house among fruit trees (The Grapes of Wrath 104-105).

Similarly, in On the Road, the “surface” dream is to travel and experience the freedom of

racing American roads towards California, which presents itself as an ultimate destination

(On the Road 53), as it is the place where the dreams can come true. Both novels hold the

West responsible for the dream’s fulfillment.

Throughout the novel, Kerouac makes several references to the “Okies” and the

Great Depression, connecting the hitchhikers and lonesome travellers of the 1950s like Sal

and Dean to “Okies” and other migrants of 1930s. The same feeling of alienation, but also

the hope of getting on the road to reach the desired destination of the American Dream

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follows the travellers of the 1950s the same way it did with the travellers of the 1930s.

After Sal’s first journey to San Francisco comes to an end, he meets Terry, a Mexican girl

on the bus to Los Angeles and together they travel back to Bakersfield and then to Terry’s

home Sabinal. Sal becomes attached to Terry and her son and wants nothing but the best

for his new nuclear family, thus revealing his yearning for a family once more. In Sabinal,

he gets a job as a cotton picker and comes across a migrant family from Oklahoma:

In a larger tent next to ours lived a whole family of Okie cotton-pickers; the

grandfather sat in a chair all day long, he was too old to work; the son and

daughter, and their children, filed every dawn across the highway to my farmer's

field and went to work. At dawn the next day I went with them. They said the

cotton was heavier at dawn because of the dew and you could make more money

than in the afternoon. Nevertheless they worked all day from dawn to sundown.

The grandfather had come from Nebraska during the great plague of the thirties-

that selfsame dustcloud my Montana cowboy had told me about-with the entire

family in a jalopy truck. They had been in California ever since. They loved to

work. In the ten years the old man's son had increased his children to the number

of four, some of whom were old enough now to pick cotton. And in that time

they had progressed from ragged poverty in Simon Legree fields to a kind of

smiling respectability in better tents, and that Vas all. They were extremely proud

of their tent. (86)

At first Sal thinks that he can get used to picking cotton and living his life in a small tent.

However, he realizes that he simply ensures his own poverty and prevents himself from

having any opportunities. Kerouac does not make fun of cotton pickers but on the contrary

respects the hard work. Yet, he ironizes intendant workers’ view on cotton picking as a

desirable mode of surviving in a post war and rather prosperous economy. Sal leaves

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Sabinal shortly after realizing that he will not be able to continue living the life of a cotton

picker and leaves back for New York, changing his dream again. “I had a book with me I

stole from a Hollywood stall, ‘Le Grand Meaulnes’ by Alain-Fournier, but I preferred

reading the American landscape as we went along. Every bump, rise, and stretch in it

mystified my longing” (93). Despite the fact that Sal is still much attached to American

landscape and enjoys his travels across America, his trip back home makes Sal “sick and

tired of life” (96) on the road. However, his return to New York seems bittersweet,

“Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the

American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush

hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of

New York” (96).

The quest to achieve something just beyond the reach is another applicable

expression of the American Dream in the novels. According to Ganser, the American

Dream is connected to the twentieth-century versions of upward mobility, such as: “the

heroic quest for freedom from hardship and oppression on the one hand and the freedom to

explore, to ‘light out for the territory’, on the other is also at the heart of the American

literary canon” (Ganser 82). The previously mentioned fantasies of the novels become

objects that are beyond the characters’ grasp: despite the constant movement and

relocating, the experience of the quest in both novels becomes unreachable and the quest to

achieve the fantasy metamorphoses into a struggle to survive. For instance, in The Grapes

of Wrath, after the Joad family spends nearly a month in a government camp looking for

jobs, they start to run low on food supplies. The following extract shows melancholy that

the family feels and expiration of their belief of settling in a better life soon:

“We been a-lookin’, Ma. Been walkin’ out sence we ca’t use the gas no more.

Been goin’ in ever’ gate, walkin’ up to ever’ house, even when we knowed they

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wasn’t gonna be nothin’. Puts a weight on ya. Goin’ out lookin’ for somepin you

know you ain’t gonna find.” (The Grapes of Wrath 413)

“Something just beyond the reach” is also greatly represented in On the Road and can

shortly be called “IT”. “IT” is something that Dean searches for during his road travels and

what makes Sal more excited about his road trips with him. Dean never precisely gives an

explanation of what “IT” means. The reader can only guess that it can be a freeing feeling

experienced during travelling across America. It can be argued that Sal finds the meaning

of “IT” almost in the beginning of On the Road: “That last thing is what you can't get,

Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for

all” (On the Road 44). Dean becomes more articulate about “IT” in the Chapter 4 of Part

Two of the novel, where he listens to a jazz musician and repeatedly exclaims “Yes” while

listening to the tube. It can also be argued that for Dean “IT” represents a fleeting instant

of an absolute freedom and experimentation. The way Dean “sees” jazz music resembles

the way he drives American roads, living in a moment and searching for something that is

out of reach, an ultimate freedom from all constraints.

Next representation of the dream, a home of one’s own, has been prominent in the

American society. Samuel discusses a research of American Dream myth carried out

during the America Dreams On exhibition (1976-1977) at the California Museum of

Science and Industry in downtown Los Angeles (101). Through interactive exercises,

hundreds of different versions of the American Dream were submitted, including an

optimistic fantasy of a perfect home. Samuel includes one of the suggestions, “my dream is

that Kenny and I will get married and live in a blue and white house with a white picket

fence,” that according to Samuel reinforces the idea that “the more things changed, the

more they remained the same” (101). Like the family from The Grapes of Wrath who

strives for a house ownership, the characters of On the Road also dream about stability and

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the nuclear family, however they hide this expression of the dream of a home behind the

dream of moving forward on the road, away from domestic responsibilities.

Undoubtedly, every character of The Grapes Wrath dreams of a stable household

and job perspectives, however, Rose of Sharon, Tom Joad’s younger sister, constantly

finds herself dreaming of the future in California with her husband Connie getting a job

and buying her a house and a car and new things for their unborn child. To quote the novel:

“An’ we’ll live in town an’ go to pitchers whenever an’—well, I’m gonna have a

‘lectric iron, an’ the baby’ll have all new stuff. Connie says all new stuff—white

an’— Well, you seen in the catalogue all the stuff they got for a baby. Maybe

right at first while Connie’s studyin’ at home it won’t be easy, but—well, when

the baby comes, maybe he'll be all done studyin’ an’ we’ll have a place, little bit

of a place. We don't want nothin’ fancy, but we want it nice for the baby—” Her

face glowed with excitement. (The Grapes of Wrath 192)

In chapter 11 of Part One of On the Road, Sal at last reaches his desired destination

San Francisco. However, his sojourn in the city only leads him to a conclusion that

everything in his life falls apart (On the Road 70). Moreover, the lovely and romantic

sights of California like the Golden Gate only make Sal ache for the familiar sights of the

East and reinforce his desire of having a family of his own:

I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I’d fall down as in a dream, clear off the

precipice. Oh where is the girl I love? I thought, and looked everywhere, as I had

looked everywhere in the little world below. And before me was the great raw

bulge and bulk of my American continent; somewhere far across, gloomy, crazy

New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is

something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines

and emptyheaded-at least that’s what I thought then. (On the Road 71)

65

A version of the American Dream that concerns a society without poverty or crime

can be associated with the events of The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck offers many

descriptions of people in poor conditions who set out on the road in order to improve those

conditions and enrich their lives. The unfortunate circumstances that lead to Jim Casy’s

death and force Tom Joad to leave his family inspires the latter to set out on his separate

way to fight the system that has failed his family, his friend Jim Casy and the entire entity

of migrating American farmers. As he puts it:

Then I’ll be all aroun’ in the dark. I’ll be ever’where—wherever you look.

Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a

cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I'll be in the way guys

yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an’

they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in

the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See? God, I’m talkin’ like Casy. Comes

of thinkin’ about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes. (The Grapes

of Wrath 495)

The characters of On the Road also encounter cruelty in police officers who

rightfully stop Sal and his friends for exceeding the speed limit but at the same time try to

exaggerate their crime. This situation leads Sal to ponder upon the police treatment of

civilians:

It was just like an invitation to steal to take our trip-money away from us. They

knew we were broke and had no relatives on the road or to wire to for money.

The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those

Americans who don’t frighten them with imposing papers and threats. It’s a

Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about

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everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don't exist to its satisfaction. “Nine

lines of crime, one of boredom,” said Louis-Ferdinand Celine. (On the Road 123)

And lastly, another expression of the American Dream, an impulse for personal

transformation combines all previously mentioned motivations of the American Dream

stimulating the characters to take a chance and travel the road that will help to bring them

closer to their desired destination – the West. To quote On the Road:

We were all delighted, we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense

behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move. […] From

the dirty snows of “frosty fagtown New York,” as Dean called it, all the way to

the greeneries and river smells of old New Orleans at the washed-out bottom of

America; then west. (On the Road 121)

In sum, this section has shown that in all its instances the American Dream remains

a powerful tool that motivates the characters of The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road, and

Americans as a whole, to move and search for a better life. As John Steinbeck puts it, “a

national dream need not, indeed may not be a clear-cut and exact” (America and

Americans 41). Steinbeck sums up these wide dreams calling them “the American Way of

Life” that “describe our vague yearnings toward what we wish we were and hope we may

be: wise, just, compassionate, and noble. The fact that we have this dream at all is perhaps

an indication of its possibility” (Steinbeck, America and Americans 41).

3.4. The West

The United States of America “has long been a major destination for both the upwardly

mobile and the dispossessed of many nations” (Mills 1). The image of America as the

place of endless possibilities has been heavily exalted in literature and media. Thus, there

is a certain sense of America as the place, “the ultimate synthesis, the bringing of all

dimensions of environment, perception and experience into the vast whole” (Mills 1). In

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particular, the portrayal of the West is usually validated by “the experience of landscape”

and “the mythology of the region” (Wyatt xvi). According to Mills, as the West became

more vital to American economy, it also obtained a greater vision within the imagination

of Americans (49). In their search of an intrinsically American experience, poets and

painters sought inspiration “amidst the novel vastness of western promise” such as wide

plains and mountains (Mills 49). As Wyatt writes:

The American settlement of California marked the end of Western man’s

Hesperian movement. So great was the beauty of the land that it conferred on the

completion of the quest the illusion of a return to a privileged source. As the

sense of an ending merged with the wonder of beginnings, California as last

chance merged with California of Eden. It proves a garden but briefly held.

(Wyatt xvi)

The Western lands started to hold more opportunities with the introduction of intersections

and an automobile. According to David Fine, “since the 1920s the automobile on the open

highway has been a central component of California – and American – Dream”

(“Beginning” 50). As he also suggests, “the open road tradition in American literature […]

equated movement west – movement, that is, into the undiscovered country, the territories

– with liberation from the strictures of the past” (Fine, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in

Fiction n.p.).

The Grapes of Wrath is a novel about the West. John Steinbeck drives the Joads

West, away from the drought and economic depression, towards California, the promised

land setting in the novel. The ‘han’bill’, fruit picking jobs, that the family treats as a golden

ticket motivates the family to find living and work on the western periphery.

Why don’t you go on west to California? There’s work there, and it never gets

cold. Why, you can reach out anywhere and pick an orange. Why, there’s always

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some kind of crop to work in. Why don’t you go there? And the owner men

started their cars and rolled away. (The Grapes of Wrath 39-40)

Thus, it seems as if the belief in a better life is so strong that the family has no doubts

about reaching the prosperous and promising state of California. When Tom Joad returns

from the prison and confronts an old neighbor about his parents’ whereabouts, Muley tells

Tom that his parents moved to his uncle’s home to save money for a trip to California.

“Well, they been choppin’ cotton, all of ‘em, even the kids an’ your grampa. Getting’

money together so they can shove on west. Gonna buy a car and shove on west where it’s

easy livin’. There ain’t nothin’ here. Fifty cents a clean acre for choppin’ cotton, an’ folks

beggin’ for the chance to chop” (The Grapes of Wrath 53).

The family, and Ma Joad in particular, are energized by the promise of the number

of possibilities that awaits them in the West. When Tom finally finds his way to his

parents, the excitement of the upcoming trip is doubled as nothing makes the family more

happy than to travel together as a unit and having an additional supporting mechanism:

Tom can drive and he can work. However, it does not appear to be easy to leave the land

where they had spent most of their lives working: “Tom turned his head and grinned.

“Granma finally heard I’m home. Ma,” he said, “you never was like this before!” Her face

hardened and her eyes grew cold. “I never had my house pushed over,” she said. “I never

had my fambly stuck out on the road. I never had to sell—ever’thing” (The Grapes of

Wrath 89). The characters of the book believe that California is like the Garden of Eden,

prosperous and untouched by the depression. “Jus’ let me get out to California where I can

pick me an orange when I want it. Or grapes. There’s a thing I ain’t never had enough of.

Gonna get me a whole big bunch of grapes off a bush, or whatever, an’ I'm gonna squash

‘em on my face an’ let ‘em run offen my chin” (The Grapes of Wrath 96), says Grampa

and in so doing providing the readers with an image of what California is thought to be

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like. Babener writes that “the Arcadian terrain of Southern California, the region has born

the weight of hyperbole” (Babener 127). She continues that the myth of the Southland as a

mecca of opportunity and abundance has been celebrated long before Hollywood industry

(127). Grampa Joad speaks for misguided dreamer when he jubilates, “Got a feelin’ it’ll

make a new fella outa me. Go right to work in the fruit” (The Grapes of Wrath 107).

It was previously mentioned that Steinbeck intertwines the narration of the life of

the Joad family with the chapters that mostly serve as a report and proof that the struggles

of the families like the Joads are real. The idea of starting over is immensely appealing

until the characters realize that no everyone can really start over. To quote the novel:

Maybe we can start again, in the new rich land—in California, where the fruit

grows. We’ll start over. But you can't start. Only a baby can start. You and me—

why, we’re all that’s been. The anger of a moment, the thousand pictures, that's

us. This land, this red land, is us; and the flood years and the dust years and the

drought years are us. We can’t start again. The bitterness we sold to the junk

man—he got it all right, but we have it still. And when the owner men told us to

go, that’s us; and when the tractor hit the house, that’s us until we’re dead. To

California or any place—every one a drum major leading a parade of hurts,

marching with our bitterness. And some day—the armies of bitterness will all be

going the same way. And they’ll all walk together, and there’ll be a dead terror

from it. (The Grapes of Wrath 101)

When the family finally decides to leave for California earlier than they have planned and

they come together near the Hudson truck as if feeling the change in the air, a scene that

anticipates their journey to California. “The people too were changed in the evening,

quieted. They seemed to be a part of an organization of the unconscious. They obeyed

impulses which registered only faintly in their thinking minds. Their eyes were inward and

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quiet, and their eyes, too, were lucent in the evening, lucent in dusty faces” (The Grapes of

Wrath 115). The truck becomes a symbol of hope, a vehicle that can bring the family to a

better life:

The family met at the most important place, near the truck. The house was dead,

and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle.

The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in dusty

globules at the worn edge of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of

red dust in their places—this was the new hearth, the living center of the family;

half passenger car and half truck, high-sided and clumsy. (The Grapes of Wrath

115-116)

The journey westward, as mentioned previously, holds many obstacles preventing

the family from enjoying their trip. The oldest family members of the family do not live

enough to see the magnificent sights of Arizona and California: Grampa dies before

reaching the high country of Arizona and Granma, saddened by his death and weakness

from the travelling, is too unwell to enjoy the view. Unfortunately, she dies right before

crossing Californian state and seeing the magnitude of what California beholds. To quote

the novel:

They drove through Tehachapi in the morning glow, and the sun came up behind

them, and then—suddenly they saw the great valley below them. Al jammed on

the brake and stopped in the middle of the road, and, “Jesus Christ! Look!” he

said. The vineyards, the orchards, the great flat valley, green and beautiful, the

trees set in rows, and the farm houses. And Pa said, “God Almighty!” The distant

cities, the little towns in the orchard land, and the morning sun, golden on the

valley. (The Grapes of Wrath 267)

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As Wyatt puts it, Steinbeck naturalizes the great myth of the West (151). According

to Mills, Western nature seems more magnificent and less sublime (51). He adds, “such

cities of wild grandeur were both proof of America’s favoured place amongst nations and

place where New World citizens could feel the very forces of creation at first hand” (Mills

51).

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is also a story about exploring the West. Using

Wyatt’s words, in the literature about the West, and about California in particular, despite

attempts to transcribe rational southern history, “the energy is displaced into an

unmediated encounter with landscape (Wyatt xvi). Thus, in California, the history of these

encounters functions as an ideology (Wyatt xvi). Sal Paradise is infatuated with the idea of

moving West in search of spontaneity and freedom and is mesmerized by the landscape

that unfolds in front of him,

I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air-air you can kiss-and

palms. Along the storied Sacramento River on a superhighway; into the hills

again; up, down; and suddenly the vast expanse of bay (it was just before dawn)

with the sleepy lights of Frisco festooned across. Over the Oakland Bay Bridge I

slept soundly for the first time since Denver. (On the Road 53)

For a short time, Sal manages to accomplish two expressions of his American

Dream simultaneously. He finds himself in California but also with a significant other,

Terry, by his side, thus he feels ready to commit to the land and to the real person: “The

thought of living in a tent and picking grapes in the cool California mornings hit me right”

(On the Road 81). However, with the time passing Sal’s enjoyment of California slowly

disappears as committing to both Terry and California becomes harder. Sal is ready to go

back to New York to his aunt and original commitments.

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The real West experience starts for Sal when he finally enters the road with his

friend Dean whose obsession with a constant change and being on the move and

wandering makes him an idol in Sal’s eyes. One can say that Dean to Sal means a great

deal like the ‘han’bill’ for the Joad family that promises unlimited possibilities. “Every

muscle twitched to live and go” (On the Road 103). And further:

And then we'll all go off to sweet life, ‘cause now is the time and we all know

time! He rubbed his jaw furiously, he swung the car and passed three trucks, he

roared into downtown Testament, looking in every direction and seeing

everything in an arc of 180 degrees around his eyeballs without moving his head.

(On the Road 103)

Dean is an evident inspiration and cure for Sal’s depression and his refusal to conform to

the cultural norms of the period challenges Sal’s idea of happiness and demands him to

accept another way of living his life. “But now the bug was on me again, and the bug's

name was Dean Moriarty and 1 was off on another spurt around the road (On the Road

104). Sal and Dean really believe in the conviction of “the only thing to do was go” (On

the Road 108) and the belief that American expression of freedom – hitting the road – is a

quintessential experience.

As we roll along this way I am positive beyond doubt that everything will be

taken care of for us-that even you, as you drive, fearful of the wheel" (I hated to

drive and drove carefully)-"the thing will go along of itself and you won't go off

the road and I can sleep. Furthermore we know America, we're at home; I can go

anywhere in America and get what I want because it's the same in every corner, I

know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly

complicated sweetness zigzagging every side." There was nothing clear about the

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things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear. (On

the Road 109)

Further signs of Sal’s infatuation with Dean are that he hangs onto every word that Dean

utters and moreover, at some point during their travelling, he calls Dean a mystic that

reveals to the reader that Sal sees Dean as somewhat a God or a convincing philosopher.

Furthermore, their treatment of the American land as the force that will save them in any

situation they find themselves in is another reason why they desire to travel to the West. As

Mills puts it, “the very scale of the American wilderness was often unnerving” (50). The

purity of the landscape and Americans’ attitude towards vastness indicate “what [is]

deemed most progressive in the US experience – its restless energy, its expansiveness and

the willingness of ordinary people to move on” (Mills 50). The sole contemplation of “the

wonders of the nature” and “this view of the intrinsic ‘Americanness’ of the western

landscapes has remained a feature of US preoccupation with the great outdoors” (Mills

51). Thus, Mills suggest that “each individual, as an American, could do this, enjoying and

flaunting their vantage point from such high moral ground” (51).

However, the promise of fulfilling the dreams and escaping is not completely

realized for the characters of both The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road. For instance, in

On the Road, Sal searches for the expression of absolute freedom through going on the

road by a car, witnessing the greatness of American landscapes and spending time with

people who strive for the same experience. However, his genial travelling is always

interrupted by thoughts that keep him coming back to the idea of commitment and settling

down. “I was willing to marry her and take her baby daughter and all if she divorced the

husband” (On the Road 113). Along the way, Sal realizes that even though the road is

endless and holds a lot of possibility in front of him, he cannot spend his whole life

running. “I want to marry a girl,” I told them, “so I can rest my soul with her till we both

74

get old. This can't go on all the time-all this franticness and jumping around. We've got to

go someplace, find something” (On the Road 105). Moreover, one of Sal’s friends notices

Sal’s confusion about his life: “The days of wrath are yet to come. The balloon won't

sustain you much longer. And not only that, but it's an abstract balloon. You'll all go flying

to the West Coast and come staggering back in search of your stone” (On the Road 117),

says Ed Dunkel. This signifies that what Sal is running from he will eventually come

running back to. The final straw for Sal is Dean’s betrayal in Mexico City. Finding an

ultimate escape from constraints, literally escaping America, and doing drugs, Sal falls

severely ill but Dean leaves him, thus his version of the escape brings him back to exactly

where he began. “Here I was at the end of America–no more land–and now there was

nowhere to go but back” (On the Road 70).

In a similar way, The Joads’ journey to the Promised Land does not fulfill their

expectations either. California brings more losses than gains for the family as the family

members start to lose hope and leave the family. The vast America turns out not big

enough for a family to rebuild their life: “It ain’t that big. The whole United States ain’t

that big. It ain’t that big. It ain’t big enough. There ain’t room enough for you an’ me, for

rich and poor together all in one country, for thieves and honest men. For hunger and fat.

Whyn’t you go back where you come from?” (The Grapes of Wrath 139)

However, John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac do not leave the reader without a

glimpse of hope. Despite the fact that the characters face many losses, both writers offer a

chance to their characters to change their destiny and follow the road in order to explore

and express what they deeply desire.

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4. Conclusion

The aim of this thesis was to argue that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Jack

Kerouac’s On the Road possess qualities of the travel writing genre and can be read as

road novels. In other words, the aim of the thesis was to determine whether both texts

under study hold the similarities of the quest narrative that can support the argument of

possibly studying them from the perspective of them being examples of the American road

novels. In my reading of the novels, I applied several concepts presented in the theoretical

section. Viewing the novels as a part the travel fiction category, I discussed the importance

of the authenticity of the travelling experience and the degree of fictionality presented in

the novels, as the inspiration for the texts comes from the experiences of travelling across

America by real people. In addition, I discussed the concept of American mobility, the

elements of which are presented in The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road to a significant

degree. Lastly, I discussed the motivation behind the moving theme of the novels – the

American Dream and the promise of the West.

Mostly represented as a novel about the hardship during the American 1930s, The

Grapes of Wrath possesses a great amount of qualities that may help to consider the

possibility of the novel be known as a more pronounced road novel. The Joads’ difficult

story of many gains and losses could not be executed without setting them on a journey

towards the fulfillment of their ultimate dream – a prosperous life in the lands of

California. Steinbeck displaces the characters in their own homeland, giving them the

chance to explore their country from the viewpoint of the open road. More well-known as

a road novel, Kerouac’s On the Road follows the steps of The Grapes of Wrath in the

exploration of the roads that lead to the west of the country. The main character Sal

Paradise wishes to experience the ultimate feeling of freedom – being on the road, far

away from the constraints of the domestic life. In his search for freedom, Sal realizes that

76

inevitably, any road leads him to yearning for his own family and that the attraction of the

mad road with its unexpected turns is only temporary.

In the introductory chapter of this thesis, I presented my motivation behind

exploring the novels under study together and most importantly, I presented the aim and

topic of my thesis. In the second chapter, I presented my theoretical framework in detail.

First, I examined the notion of travel writing and its subgenre – travel fiction. What is

noteworthy for my study is that the selected novels both incorporate an account of real

events that have happened to the real people in America and story-telling of the fictional

world. In my theoretical section, I also presented the notion of American mobility and the

culture of the American road, as the road trip across American lands present a

quintessential American experience, especially in the case of the chosen texts. I also

presented the concept of the American Dream and its multiple expressions that are chased

by the characters of The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road.

In the analysis section, I studied the similarities between the creative processes of

John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac in writing their respective novels. I continued my

analysis exploring American mobility in the context of the chosen texts and its elements.

For example, the descriptions of the element of mobility like automobiles and intersections

are presented in such great variety in both The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road that they

become characters of their own and are often attributed with human characteristics in a

form of personification. After this, I continued by exploring the motivation behind the

characters’ movement – the American Dream and its several expression as represented in

the novels under study. This led to the final section of my analysis, the West that also

greatly connects The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road in the motivation behind setting

out on the road.

77

What this thesis has shown is that even though John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac

use different writing techniques, the aims of their stories correspond with each another.

The final products of their creative processes consist of a reportage of what has been

observed and experienced, reflecting the time the novels depict and fictional story-telling

that incorporates an inspired by the real people and events fictional world. Kerouac wanted

to portray the madness of the American road based on his own travel experience and

Steinbeck wished to transcribe the real experience of migrant families during the 1930s in

America and expose the inhumane conditions people found themselves in. The profound

knowledge of the landscape, myths, and the philosophical approach to the discoveries that

the characters make during their time on the road can only reassure the value of the texts

that remain essential in studying road narratives and specifically American road narratives.

The thesis has also shown that both The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road possess

many qualities that are significant in the portrayal of the movement in travel literature and

especially in American travel texts. Both illustrate the willingness to start a journey on the

road, believing in the possibility of achieving the ultimate fantasy – the American Dream,

portrayed in multiple ways in the texts under study. Moreover, both authors manage to

attach the intrinsically American quality to the characters, whom Steinbeck calls “a

restless, a dissatisfied, a searching people” (America and Americans 32) thus

demonstrating how it is intrinsically American to find a new way in a form of relocation.

Infatuation with the West is another correlating similarity found in The Grapes of Wrath

and On the Road. Depicting different decades of the twentieth century, it becomes evident

that the myth of the prosperous West and “healing powers” of its landscapes remains an

important part of the belief system of American nation. Furthermore, the research and

inclusion of the more recent road texts like The New American Road Trip Mixtape by

Brandon Leonard has shown that the idea of “freeing” American mobility is greatly

78

reinforced in the present time and that the depiction of the movement across American

landscapes by Steinbeck and Kerouac serves as a great example of and inspiration for

exploring the American roads.

However, this thesis presents only several travel motif similarities that can be found

in the chosen texts. Considering the fact that the genre of travel writing and especially

American road travelling is an extremely popular one, it could be suggested to continue the

research and provide a comparative analysis of the more recent texts and their relation to

earlier novels like The Grapes of Wrath and On the Road. To provide an example and

finalize the findings of this thesis I would like to demonstrate an extract from a song by

American singer Halsey that eloquently depicts the continuation of the relationship

between American nation, the road and the West:

All we do is drive

All we do is think about the feelings that we hide

All we do is sit in silence waiting for a sign

Sick and full of pride

All we do is drive

And California never felt like home to me

And California never felt like home

And California never felt like home to me

Until I had you on the open road and now we're singing (Halsey “Drive”)

79

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