Quest for Self and Identity in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road Essay

The Quest For Identity In On The highroad In Jack Kerouacs On The Road, the protagonists embark upon a long, arduous quest for human identity. Their aim is to uncover who they truly are, where they check up on in the scheme of things and what the message of life is. They articulate this desire by speaking, during the novel, of the look for IT, IT being human identity. This IT is an intangible thing something that holds a diametrical meaning for every individual. It encompasses all the things humans yearn for life answers, the meaning of the universe, happiness, enlightenment, self-fulfilment, beatification (as articulated by Kerouac). On the Road is the story of a desperate search for IT, in which the protagonists finally come to realise that IT is unattainable and time cannot be defied. The human search for IT is never-ending. Even when we know that the search is virtually impossible, that IT is unreachable, that ou... ...iences and thoughts. The novel concludes with the po ignant truth humans often sieve to ignore that time and aging are inexorable and that the answers to life exit most probably never be known to any of us while on earth. Works Cited Kerouac, Jack. On The Road. Penguin Books Limited, parvenu York. 1955. Honan, Simon. The Beat Generation, Allen and Unwin Publishing, New York. 1987.Eliot, T.S. The Collected Works of TS Eliot, Eldridge Publishing Inc, Sydney.1954.