Kerouac and Burroughs as Outcasts Sarah Moorhouse College

‘What seemed to set the Beats […] apart from their peers was a deep, disturbing alienation that transcended their identities as artists and extended to personal idiosyncrasy and a self-destructive bent. […] To be sure, their project was in large part an attempt to reveal, in the most intimate detail, the world of the outcast.’

Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs are two novelists often grouped under the term ‘Beat’ authors; the novels On the Road (1957) by Kerouac and Naked Lunch (1959) by Burroughs gave voice to and developed the counterculture in 1960s America which formed a revolt against mass culture. The novels depict spiritual crises undergone by outsider figures and are characterized by resistance of social authority; the ‘alienation’ of the Beats represents a movement away from institutions and is political in its defiance of politics. Both Kerouac and Burroughs developed distinctive styles of writing which enabled them to break with convention; indeed, Burroughs viewed language as a means of ‘control’, and thus his ‘cut up and fold in’ technique, as well as Kerouac’s ‘sketching’ technique, entails an attempt to break free of circumscribed ways of thinking. The ‘world of the outcast’ which these writers evoke is one...