Similar Roads, Different Ends: A Comparative Study Of The Theme Of Quest In On The Road And Generation â…©

On the Road, viewed as the Bible of the Beats, is written by Jack Kerouac who is also considered as the spokesman for the Beat Movement in America. The novel is largely an autobiographic description of the travel experience of Sal Paradise and his friend Dean Moriarty, which faithfully reflects the living status of the Beat Generation. Generation X:Tales for an Accelerated Culture was published in1991and it is regarded as the cannon of the contemporary writer Douglas Coupland who is one of the "Generation X" writers. Separated in time by over30years, the two novels resemble each other on the common theme—quest. The protagonists in these two novels coincidentally set their feet on the quest of self at the age around30. However, the content of the quest, the roles that the protagonists played and the ultimate direction of the two groups of protagonists’road trips vary greatly due to different social backgrounds. This thesis is to reveal the confusion and quest of the youths in two different times from the prospective of comparing and contrasting the two generations’road of quest.The title of this thesis is Similar Roads, Different Ends:A Comparative Study of the Theme of Quest in On the Road and Generation X."Similar Roads" encompasses three levels of meaning:firstly, the protagonists in the two novels set out for similar aims. Secondly, the protagonists of these two novels deliberately marginalize themselves in the periphery of the society and are portrayed as the "degraded men" They travel in a little group, including both men and women. Thirdly, both of the protagonists’quests in the white world end up with failure. Similar as their fate of quest, their destinations are different. For On the Road, they return to the white culture. For Generation X, they hopelessly leave America and continue their quest in another country, Mexico. Therefore,"similar roads, different ends" of two generations is analyzed in light of the uniqueness of their respective social backgrounds.The whole structure of this thesis is governed by the theme of "quest". The thesis consists of altogether five parts. The first part is the Introduction which contains the general introduction of the two writers, literature review on both novels and the layout and significance of this thesis. The second part consists of three chapters. Chapter One probes into the social factors endowing the quest of two novels with different contents. Chapter Two analyzes the roles that the protagonists of two novels played on their similar roads of quest, including the group roles and the female’s roles in different social backdrops. Chapter Three makes a comparison of the ultimate fate and result between the two quests and expounds the reasons for the difference and the social changes involved. The last part is the Conclusion which sums up the theme and the study approach of the thesis. The ultimate purpose of this thesis is to draw a lasting attention to the mentality and spiritual status of American youngsters in special social eras of America.