Week 1 Travelling Reading 3 Lo scrittore americano Jack Kerouac scrisse alla fine degli anni 40 il romanzo On the Road, che descrive il lungo viaggio che lui stesso fece attraverso gli Stati Uniti. Leggi il seguente testo e rispondi alle domande. On the road Jack Kerouac was a novelist belonging to the movement of the Beat Generation : a group of young artists who rejected the materialistic and racist style of life of the American white middle-class in the 1950s. The Beats believed in peace, love and total freedom of behaviour. The word beat , invented by Kerouac, means dissatisfied and outcast , but also sacred owing to his interest in mysticism and religion and it indicates the beat of jazz too, a spontaneous type of music Kerouac really loved. He wrote On the Road in 1948 and the novel became a best-seller when it came out in 1957. It tells the story of a group of friends who travel across the U.S.A. without a destination, driving, catching buses and hitch-hiking. The narrator is Sal Paradise Kerouac himself a student in New York where he meets Dean Moriarty who resembles Kerouac s best friend Neal Cassady an anti-conformist young man from the West who loves travelling and adventures. Dean decides to come back to the West and after some time Sal joins him in Denver, Colorado. For two years the two friends travel together visiting the Great Plains of the Midwest, the Great Lakes, the East Coast and the Southern States. They meet new and different people, have all types of experiences and come into contact with the life of tramps and the homeless. In the end after reaching San Francisco, Sal comes back to New York, to his previous life; while Dean is unable to stop travelling. Their endless voyage suggests their desire for freedom, their way of escaping from a society they don t believe in; but it also expresses their wish to live every moment of their life with great intensity and to forget their sense of void. 1 The term Beat means: a) c) dissatisfied and outcast b) 2 What are the ideals of the Beat Generation ? 3 When was the novel On the Road published? 4 The main characters are: a) b) 5 Where does the voyage start? 6 What parts of the U.S.A. do the protagonists visit? 7 How does the story end? 8 Why do the protagonists like travelling? USEFUL WORDS behaviour = comportamento; to believe = credere; character = personaggio; to escape = fuggire; to hitch-hike = fare l autostop; to join = unirsi; outcast = emarginato; owing to = a causa di; previous = precedente; to publish = pubblicare; to reject = rifiutare; to resemble = assomigliare; tramp = vagabondo; void = vuoto. 6