Abstract
This study aimed to examine and analyze the novel The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac based on the political theory of Michel Foucault. This semi-fictional account is the story of search for the original experience and enlightenment and introduces the character of Gary Snyder as Japhy Ryder who is a poet, critical thinker, philosopher and political radical, and Ray Smith, the alter ego of Jack Kerouac himself. The main focus would be on Foucault’s conceptions of power, power relations, institutions, normalization, and surveillance. This study will also seek to provide a true understanding of the life and times of Jack Kerouac. Moreover, it represents the cultural, political, and historical background based on which Kerouac had written his work. Kerouac’s novel represents the spirit of the age of a people who sought change, difference, and disobedience; the main characters are antiheroes who challenge their prisonlike structure of the society. In contrast, the government has the upper hand by means of its distinct and overlapping institutions that not only neutralize such acts or resistances but make normal and ordinary those individuals who were themselves the promoters and examples of abnormality.
Highlights
The This study puts Foucault in direct relation to American context to look into the question of freedom in America and the degree which writers have found out about this big lie in American history
Police In one of the most suggestive remarks Foucault has ever made, he struggles to find the authority that is at work in making individuals ordinary by the very people who serve the institutions; here, he comes up with the idea that institutions have come up with people that he calls “judges of normality” and it is through these judges that institutions make surveillance ubiquitous
With the opening of chapter fifteen, Ray Smith is in San Francisco and goes to visit his friend Cody and his wife Rosie: I put on my new flannel shirt and new socks and underwear and my jeans and packed the rucksack tight and slung it on and went to San Francisco that night just to get the feel of walking around the city night with it on my back
Summary
The This study puts Foucault in direct relation to American context to look into the question of freedom in America and the degree which writers have found out about this big lie in American history. Society, politics, context, and history with Foucault’s political philosophy will end up offering a kind of analysis which will shed up much brighter light of the real system operating behind the curtain of America’s domestic politics. The Dharma Bums (2006) has been seen by many as a novel that expresses the spirit of an age that wanted to revolutionize the values in making people aware of the suppression of the American society. The Dharma Bums exhibits a hatred toward tradition and even modernity that seeks to restrict human beings’ freedom and make them abnormal individuals. Despite the fact that the lives of bums and travelers depicted in the novel seem to try to manifest the revolutionary way of life led by Kerouac, other Beat Generation members, and the people they had inspired, there exists another much deeper level of meaning in the novel.
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