The beat generation

The Beat Generation was a literary and artistic movement that arose at the end of the Forties in the USA after the Second World War and in the early days of the Cold War. Initially perceived as subversive rebels, today the Beats are seen as protagonists in one of the 20th movements most important cultural movements. There are four main themes they dealt with in their texts. First there was their desire to break the codes, then they searched for intensity, they were also constantly in movement and finally they need rhythm, that’s why there are often travel, music, drugs… around them.

We are going to deal with the novel On the Road written by Jack Kerouac in 1957, and also with the poem Howl written by Allen Ginsberg in 1956 after spending eight months at the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric Institute. My analysis will also take examples from Avatar directed by James Cameron in 2009 because it presents initiatory courses but it also warns us against some dangerous trends of our society so there is also a rebellion against society in this film.

We will analyze how these works show that initiatory journeys can give purpose to life but also offer comments on society.

To begin with, we are going to see that there are frustrated characters who needed to explore and then we will focus on their desire to change and break the codes.

The difficulty to define one’s own self and the meaning of life can be the starting point of an initiatory journey. The need to move away is all the more understandable when frustration doesn’t seem to be an individual problem but rather the concern of a whole generation in a particular society. In the 1950s, the Beat Generation authors were frustrated by the American society. Indeed, The Beat Generation stood for individuality, freedom of expression and liberation from stifling traditions that they believed held society captive. In Kerouac’s novel On the Road, in chapter 6 Part II, the characters move from the Eastern coast where they have their “spats” to the West and they are thrilled to leave “confusion and nonsense behind”. In Howl, Allen Ginsberg also expresses the idea that he belongs to a cursed generation because he says: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness” but the problem is broader and affects everyone: “Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks”. The sense of frustration is not limited to the 1950’s. Although Cameron’s Avatar is an epic science-fiction film set in the twenty-second century, the main character, Jake Sully also experiences frustration because he is a physically disabled Marine who is considered an inadequate replacement of his deceased brother in a scientist team and he is part of a generation contained by an imperialistic administration searching natural resources on other planets. Moving away from frustrating places opens new paths.

All the characters of these works need to explore. In Howl and On the Road travelling is a way to leave a frustrating society behind. Indeed, in On the Road, distance offers the promise of a better world: they move away “from the dirty snows of “frosty fagtown New York” (…) all the way to the greeneries and river smells of old New Orleans”. The extract takes place on the road, and the narrator speaks about “the purity of the road”, which shows how important

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