The Beat Generation

By Bryan Hyde

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till I drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”

—Jack Kerouac

Definition:  “A group of American poets and novelists who were active and influential in the late 1950’s, Beat writers rejected the prevailing socials mores.  Feeling oppressed by the dominant culture, they held and publicly advocated anti-intellectual, antipolitical, and, in general, antiestablishment views.  Beat not only referred to feelings of oppression (“beaten down”) but also to a desired, “beatific” state or vision of ecstasy.  Beat writers tended to express their alternative values through the form of their writing, which, compared to more conventional modern works, has a very loose structure and uses a great deal of slang” (The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms).

Notable Examples: 

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

“Howl” by Allen Ginsberg

Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey

Subject Genre: Expressionist Poetry and Fiction

Expressionism: Expressionists reject realism and share the impressionist intention to present a personal vision through art.  To render this personal vision artistically, expressionists depict their subjects as they feel or sense or experience them rather that as those subjects appear objectively.  To expose idiosyncratic and often extreme states of human consciousness and emotion, expressionist works tend to oversimplify and distort (The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms).

Representational Genre:  Narrator in Poetry; Narrator + Dialogue in Fiction

Narrative Genre:  The works of the Beats typically are romances.  They explore the journey toward enlightenment and transcendence.  However, there are elements of comedy and satire.

Example of romance:

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long, skies over New Jersey and sense all the raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens old rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarity the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarity.”

            --On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Example of humor:

“A simopath  . . . is a citizen convinced he is an ape or other simian. It is a disorder peculiar to the army and discharge cures it"

--Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs

Example of satire:

“Said the Presidential skeleton

I won't sign the bill

Said the Speaker skeleton

Yes you will

Said the Representative skeleton

I object

Said the Supreme Court skeleton

Whaddya expect”

            --“The Ballad of the Skeletons” by Allen Ginsberg  

Questions:

1. During their time, the Beats were misunderstood and parodied.  Now, their work is respected and anthologized.  Why do you think attitudes have changed?

2. How would American Literature, particularly poetry, have evolved differently if the Beat movement had not occurred?

3. What issues are brought up in some of the works of the Beats?