Abstract

Big Sur is an important novel in Kerouac’s late period. The origin, content and purpose of this novel are significantly different from his previous works. Through analyzing the symbolic images in the novel, we can understand Kerouac’s painful reflection on his resistance against the American mainstream culture, his deep understanding of the failure to convey his spiritual appeals and his inability to compromise with the society. The study of Big Sur not only shows Kerouac’s spiritual collapse, but also reveals the spiritual trajectory of the Beats from fanaticism to decay.

Big Sur, on the coast of California, is a 99-mile-long rugged and beautiful waterfront. “Big Sur is fabulously romantic, … with its rugged terrain, its treacherous sea, and its challenging climate” (Wallraff, 2002). Kerouac, the soul of the Beat Generation, finishes his novel Big Sur there. The agony and desperation shown in the novel helps to understand the ideological doom of the Beats. While On the Road, Kerouac’s best-known work, records the height of Beat Generation, Big Sur, which was published in 1962, written 7 years before Kerouac’s death, accurately summarizes the spiritual end of the Beat Generation. After Big Sur, Kerouac has never written works shown his spiritual pursuit and agony, which makes this novel the one that reveals his deep frustration and desperation over his spiritual struggle. In Big Sur, though the “spontaneous prose method” Kerouac has developed is applied, the symbols in Big Sur can still impress the readers by their concise and direct relation with Kerouac’s crushed feelings (Kostas, 2002). He never tries to escape from his true feelings for his definite failure, so the symbols pave the way for a thorough understanding of Kerouac’s spiritual journey and the ineluctable collapse of his dream. As Aram Saroyan said in the preface to Big Sur: “In Big Sur, we have the plaintive but magnificent aftermath” (Aram, 1992).

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