Down The River And On The Road

Mark Twain is one of the greatest writers in world literature. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is his masterwork, the one book from which, as Ernest Hemingway noted, "all modern American literature comes." It is considered one of the half dozen most significant works in American literature. And Jack Kerouac is a spokesman of the post-World Warâ…¡Beat Generation. His On the Road is often described as the defining work of the Beat Generation. Although the two novels were published 70 years apart, there are striking similarities. Therefore it will be rewarding to conduct a comparative study of these two literary works, which is exactly what the current research sets out to do. But this study is not a mere effort to show similarities. It is meant to be a systematic study, with an attempt to demonstrate not only similarities, but also difference between the two novels, in order to reveal the continuity of some literary traditions and meanwhile display changes in the evolution of American literature.The thesis is structured in the following way. The introductory part gives a brief survey of recent academic studies on the topic and then sets down the aim of the current research. The second part focuses on the major similarities between Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Kerouac's On the Road. The similarities include the themes of quest and anti-hero, and the narrative technique of symbolism. The symbols listed are river/road vs. land/town, life as a journey, and language as a token of identity. The third part of the thesis juxtaposes events or excerpts from the two works to show major differences, which range from local colorism vs. black humor and illiteracy vs. education to initiation vs. exile. The fourth part goes on to probe into the social causes of the differences, which turn out to be American dream vs. beat values in terms of social background, and realism vs. modernism with regard to literature. The conclusion justifies the research topic once again and then recapitulates the major points of the thesis.It is hoped that this research will arouse the interest of more students arid critics alike so that they will carry on the comparison between The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and On the Road; so that we can go deeper and deeper in our understanding of the two generations of writers, and the continuity as well as changes in American literature.