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By Root 1764 0

This image ultimately makes its way to the last paragraph of the published version, but read as a beginning, it brings to the forefront the novel’s panoramic scope, which contextualizes the “pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself” as a “sad drama in the American night.” On July 4, 1949, Kerouac writes in his journal of his plans to go from Mexico to New York and feels a “heavy melancholy, almost like pleasure” that he describes thus: “The big American night keeps closing in, redder and darker all the time. There is no home.” While Kerouac could never renounce places and people in his life that constituted his sense of a home—most notably his mother, to whom he always returned, and his birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts—he always felt the unique combination of exuberance and despair at being homeless in one’s native land. The breaking-point intensity of much of Kerouac’s writing, which often asks the reader to linger between intellectual assessment and emotional release, evinces just how much was at stake for Kerouac in constructing a vocabulary that could adequately account for the relationship between the individual and the nation.

“This is the story of America,” Kerouac explains in On the Road, when describing Sal Paradise’s frustrated attempt to bend the rules during a brief stint as a security guard. “Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do.” The period after World War II that marked the start of the cold war endorsed a mythology of national unity. In NSC 68, a classified report prepared for the U.S. National Security Council in April 14, 1950, a year before Kerouac sat down to compose the On the Road scroll, three “realities” emerge in a section entitled “Fundamental Purpose of the United States”: “Our determination to maintain the essential elements of individual freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; our determination to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; and our determination to fight if necessary to defend our way of life.” In this section, the rhetoric used in defense of liberty is unmistakably threatening, even imperialist, in its tone. Almost a century earlier, Walt Whitman wrote, in “Democratic Vistas,” of “perfect individualism” that “deepest tinges and gives character to the idea of the aggregate.” In the 1950s, this paradigm seemed to reverse directions: It was the state structuring the requirements of the individual, both within national borders—a sacrifice that amounted to doing one’s part for the war effort—and without.

In the year that Kerouac composed the scroll of On the Road, the United States expanded its bomb testing from the South Pacific to the Nevada desert, literally bringing the war home. The House Committee on Un-American Activities began its second round of hearings, in which artists and intellectuals were required to prove their innocence and loyalty to the United States and to renounce their Communist ties. Any minor offense could have been labeled deviant, and citizens suffered the curtailment of civil liberties in the name of upholding freedom from totalitarianism. This period of compulsory confession was the performance mode of a vast movement of secrecy that was so effective, as Joyce Nelson argues, because of “the purposeful fragmentation and compartment-alization of information.” The less people understood about the connective tissue both within and between politics and culture, the more effective the government could be in manipulating its own population while seeking global influence and authority.

In the article that formulated the cold war policy of containment, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in 1947, George Kennan stressed the connection between social harmony at home and control overseas. The United States, he argued, had to market itself as a country that was “coping successfully with the problems of its internal life and with the responsibilities of a World Power” and “holding its own among the major ideological currents of the time.” Signs of weakness, according to