Cadet Michaela Wright
Colonel Ball
ERH 322WX-02 Beat Generation
10 February 2015
Final Draft
Upon being introduced to the Beat Generation, there is no book more enlightening to read than Kerouac’s On the Road. While reading and trying to interpret what the Beat Generation truly is, the following passage captured my attention: “We fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess-across the night, eastward over the plain, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent.” This passage best described the Beat Generation to me through the weighty verbs, the setting, and the religious reference of the old man with the Word.
As the passage begins, using verbs such as ‘fumed’, ‘screamed’ and ‘mad’, what comes to mind automatically are how the people involved are greatly filled with pure excitement of life, something new to this time period. Continuing on to learn about the Beat Generation, the term ‘mad’ is used more and more frequently by magazines and in John Tytells’ Naked Angels. I believe this passage does a good job of describing the newfound definition of the word. Americans who were not part of the Beat Generation saw the adjective ‘mad’ as an insult where others, such as Kerouac, took it almost as a compliment about how they expressed their passion for life. Given the amount of devastation the Great Depression and World War II had on America, it was not common for people to outwardly express such emotions and be socially approved therefore referred to as ‘mad’. This was especially true of someone who would be temporarily occupying in a ‘nook’ as described in the passage. The description of the landscape they were at, ‘the roof of America’ shows also that they cared deeply for all of the things that they were wanting to experience by personalizing or making it their own. This stuck out to me as a defining difference of how the Beats were not the same as other Americans such as college fraternities who simply wanted to party just to get drunk.
The point that stuck out the greatest was that of the image of the old man with white hair with the Word coming towards them to silence them. Perhaps the emphasis of the white hair on the man was symbolic of purity. After all, there were many contradictions of how the Beats could consider themselves religious and a part of the Beat Generation simultaneously given their way of life of sex, alcohol and drugs. This gives me enlightened insight simply by seeing life from their point of view. It is easy to see a hitchhiker on the road in hobo-styled clothes and have judgmental thoughts. However, hearing it from their side of life and putting myself in their shoes, is the biggest tool to gaining insight I can use.

Work Cited
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 2007. 49-50. Print.