The New Rugged Individualism: Modernity and Countersystem in Post-World War II Fiction

Abstract

This essay examines the work of J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac as a reaction to the overarching nihilism, exhaustion and despair of modernity and postmodernity. More specifically, these works are seen through the lens of the sociological 'countersystem' model of Sjoberg and Cain, who posit that studying behavior defined as 'negative' by the dominant social system can act as a heuristic device for that system. Novelists such as Kerouac and Salinger create fictive countersystems as a means of addressing weaknesses in the existing social structure and implicitly trying to resolve them. Their countersystems are, to a large extent, a hybrid of Buddhism and Romanticism. Finally, the characters of Kerouac and Salinger are discussed as representing a return to the individualistic heroes of American premodernity, such as Huck Finn and Hester Prynne. The work of Kerouac and Salinger, among others, is termed New Rugged Individualism.