Formation and time in Jack Kerouac: <i>On the road</i> as a <i>Bildungsroman</i>

Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to show how the novel On the Road, by the American writer Jack Kerouac, can be related to the modern tradition of the Bildungsroman due to its articulation of historic time, narrative time and the characters’ experience time. Some American critics, like Regina Weinreich (1984), James T. Jones (1999) e Ben Giamo (2000), have noticed the importance of the issue of time in Kerouac’s works, acknowledging its narrative developments in The Legend of Duluoz, the collection of his autobiographical novels in which On the Road is included. In Brazil, one of the critics who better discusses the problem of mystical experience in Kerouac’s works is Claudio Willer (2014), who analyzed the religious heterodoxy of the most famous exponents of the Beat Generation in his book Os Rebeldes. Aiming to contribute with the continuity of these studies, I want to demonstrate that Kerouac’s mystical and existential aspects are necessarily articulated with aesthetical and philosophical considerations of the German Bildung tradition, especially the ones in Oswald Spengler’s (1928a; 1928b) The Decline of the West