The Glamorisation of Death in Kerouac's Tristessa

This article explores the presentation of beauty and death in Jack Kerouac’s 1960 novella Tristessa. It scrutinises a set of narrative strategies that perform the glamorisation of forms and, simultaneously and paradoxically, the glamorisation of their revocation and destruction. In a crucial way this double movement echoes the metaphysical concept of the sublime developed by Immanuel Kant. The framework of Kant’s sublime, therefore, is used to analyse the relationship between the strategy of glamorisation that propels the narrative, and the processes of destruction and self-destruction that haunt Kerouac’s text.