Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Kerouac’s On the Road †The River and the

Twains Huckleberry Finn and Kerouacs On the Road The River and the RoadOne constituent that separates a good novel from a great novel is its enduring effects on society. A great novel transcends time it changes and mirrors the consciousness of a civilization. One such novel is Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For the past one hundred and fifteen years, it has remained in print and has been one of the most widely studied texts in high schools and colleges. According to Lionel Trilling, its success is due to Twains voice of unpretentious truth (92) embodied in the young fibber Huck Finn who reveals the hypocrisy and moral deprivation of society through his innocent observations. It is a picaresque novel, or novel of the road, where the river acts as the road that carries the characters on incessant adventures. Seventy years after the publication of Huckleberry Finn, Jack Kerouac began to write his picaresque novel entitled On the Road. Like Twains Huck Finn, Sal heaven is Kerouacs nave narrator who captures the essence of life in his depictions of experiences on the road. Both characters are social commentators regarding the conditions of their surroundings they are public barometers who measure the demesne of societal values. Even though Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is heralded as one of the greatest American novels, Jack Kerouacs On the Road embraces a loftier, more mature, apparitional ideal of life that transcends Twains social commentary and will one day place it permanently in the anthologies of American literature. The similarities between Huckleberry Finn and On the Road are numerous and worth consideration because they depict the hand in hand progression (one following the other in ... ...76. Hunt, Tim. Kerouacs asymmetrical Road Development of Fiction. Hamden Archon Books, 1981. Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York Penguin, 1957. ---------, Jack. Selected Letters Jack Kerouac 1957-1969. Ed. Ann Charters. New York Viking P, 1999. N icosia, Gerald. Memory Babe A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac. Berkeley U of atomic number 20 P, 1983. Swartz, Omar. The View from On the Road. Carbondale Southern Illinois UP 1999. Trilling, Lionel. A Certain Formal Aptness. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Eds. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston Bedford, 1995. 284-85. Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn A Case Study in Critical Controversy. Eds. Gerald Graff and James Phelan. Boston Bedford, 1995. Weinreich, Regina. The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac. New York Paragon House, 1990.