earticle

영어

This essay investigates the stylistic and political characteristics of ontological connectivity in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Ontological connectivity of the text is unveiled through its distinctive narrative style and language in which interactive relationality of different beings is constantly deterritorialized or remapped. The exiled journey of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty along with the gang of madness indicates the constitutive process via excessive engagement and consumption with the relationship with others and capitalistic culture. The narratorial exile and cartographic mobilization are closely related to the life of the author as a vagabond who admitted himself to have francophone Canadian heritage though he was born to be an American in New England. Félix Guattari claims that the energetic engagement formulates the creatively assembled language of art which is not a representation or imitation of reality but a productive performance in and of itself. The French philosopher describes the American writer and his work as “the route of the American rhizome . . . successive lateral offshoots in immediate connection with an outside.” But I argue that their ontological mobilization is geared toward resisting fixed formality and hierarchization to concretize the ontological oneness beyond the locality of America, so as to virtually formulate and mediate new cartographies of the transnational and cosmopolitan space.