LITERATURE

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight”

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight”

Introduction

Writing about love is quite love because it is filled with contrasting emotions such as joys, miseries, pleasure and pain. These varying emotions are hard to express in words because amidst the bitterness and excitement, there lays many nuances. Some argue that writing about love is to write well about the mystery, on the enigma of man and life, death. The writers point out the contradiction of their condition and rely on the magical, sacred incoherent and irrational feelings of love. They say it was born in the deepest, darkest parts of human nature, breaking the boundaries of rationality and common sense. Despite these contradictions in expressions of love, many authors have penned down its feelings and among them American authors are a bit ahead. In this paper, theme of love in works of two American authors is studied, i.e. “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac and “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov.

Discussion

“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac

“On the Road” is written by Jack Kerouac, an American writer, and was published in 1957. It is a travelogue which is based on a story in which Kerouac and his friends take a trip across America through hitchhiking. It is filled with poetry, jazz music and drug use which were common for the roaming generation of that time, a generation which was named “Beat Generation” after this novel.

Though the book is about travel, but deep inside it is about freedom - free love, a freedom from responsibilities and binding relationships. Kerouac in his book has represented a renaissance of romantic relationships in America. He used to idealize a revisit of a more authentic and essential life and powerful survival in the present. The time when the book was written, writing about a relationship between two men was thought to be a taboo but “On the Road” is a love story, chronicling the vicissitudes of a relation between two men (Dardess, pp. 200-06). It is Dean who gives Sal the impetus to go “On the Road” in part one, they go “On the Road” together in part two, and the relationship is cemented in part three, where Sal refers to Dean as his “brother” and where he is Dean's lone defender. In part four, the journey to the end of the road in Mexico, Sal begins to retreat a bit in his hero-worship of Dean, and he refers to Dean's mania in apocalyptic terms. Part five finds Dean “On the Road” alone, tattered, shattered, speechless (Williams, 2009, pp. 1-6). The novel ends with a lyric evocation of Dean, one that suggests that he is gone, but not forgotten. The very publication of “On the Road” opened the doors for many number of “fringe” narratives, like William Burroughs's Naked Lunch (published in 1959), works that were thematically and formally more daring and ...