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301.More information
To speak of picaresque in the contemporary American novel requires a redefinition of terms. In a mobile society that glorifies freedom and the individual, and has a social hierarchy nowhere as rigid as that of feudalistic Castile, the pícaro is less a victim than marginal. Following Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac revitalizes the picaresque mode by focusing on the U.S. of a disinherited generation and by raising to heroic stature the nearly-sanctified figure of the social delinquent. He transforms the picaresque journey into a spiritual quest but, at times, his writing attains a degree of freedom so solipsistic that he is ultimately led to adopt, unconsciously no doubt, a conventional picaresque posture that has lost its subversive character.
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