From Kerouac back to Thoreau: The Pull towards Nature, a Revolt against Culture?

Many of Jack Kerouac's road novels stage a retreat into the wild that typifies an irrepressible urge towards natural phenomena, an urge which closely resonates with the works of Henry David Thoreau a century earlier. In Kerouac's Big Sur (1962) and in Thoreau's Walden (1854), nature is envisaged as a safe haven from the sociohistorical forces of oppression that shape modern existence, but also – more romantically – as a gateway to spiritual insights that affords the possibility for transcendence. Highlighting a series of analogies on the narrative, aesthetic and ontological planes between the two novels, the article goes on to show that this tropism towards nature simultaneously involves a process of disengagement from the cultural predicament of modern America; for Thoreau this meant the industrial revolution, for Kerouac the post-war quagmire. Reinterpreted as a romantic form of the revolt, I argue that this disengagement promotes a deliberate alienation from the social world that blurs the line between the quest for transcendence and the solipsistic condition.