Jack Kerouac\u27s Artistic Apprenticeship and the Discovery of His Authentic Voice

Few novels so clearly dramatize an artist\u27s discovery of his authentic voice as does Kerouac\u27s On the Road. The publication of the writing that Kerouac did before On the Road, and particularly the writing he did before The Town and the City, offers almost unprecedented opportunity to study his artistic apprenticeship and trace his development as an artist. To study Kerouac\u27s apprenticeship is to witness him learning how to liberate himself in order to be that which he would become. In addition to shedding light on this unexamined aspect of Kerouac\u27s career, I hope this study might inspire similar breakthroughs and breakouts in other would-be artists. The dynamics of this developmental process are under-theorized. No one to my knowledge has written of this process as thoroughly as Otto Rank, which is why I\u27ve used his theories of artistic apprenticeships to inform this analysis. I used Martin Heidegger\u27s Being and Time because he founds his philosophy on the same central question that I believe Kerouac founds his art: the question of Being. I wanted to examine Kerouac\u27s writing before On the Road to trace how his psychological artistic development was informed by the philosophical question that would give On the Road and his later works much of their power to move people. Within my study I move from the death of Kerouac\u27s older brother, Gerard, to the Joan Anderson/Cherry Mary letter that he received from Neal Cassady that convinced him once and for all that he could write an artistically worthwhile novel using first-person narration and unabashedly autobiographical material. I cover the broad spectrum of writing that influenced him, from the pulp fiction magazine The Shadow to the plotless, first-person short stories of William Saroyan, from the intense, verbose novels of Thomas Wolfe to the underground beauty he found in the work of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Louis Ferdinand-Celine. I examine the influences of football and jazz on his spontaneous prose technique. I also look at the influence of his artistic mentors Sammy Sampas, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, and other Beat Generation figures like Lucien Carr and Herbert Huncke and, finally, at the influence of Neal Cassady himself. I also believe that the deaths of Gerard, Sammy Sampas, and Leo Kerouac, Kerouac\u27s father, had a profound impact on Kerouac\u27s artistic development and his ability to impart his feeling of life\u27s ephemerality into his art. Kerouac\u27s ability to impart this very feeling is the source of much of his writing\u27s artistic power. Jack Kerouac was an artistic innovator who began, like all artists must, as an artistic imitator. Before he wrote On the Road, he wrote several books as others had written them. A critical analysis of his pre-On the Road works offers one the opportunity to see a rare thing indeed: the development of an authentic artist in America