You can’t escape the Shrouded Stranger

"The Scroll": Kerouac composed On the Road in three weeks on a continuous, one hundred and twenty-foot scroll, using a typewriter.

After reading the first few chapters of Grapes of Wrath, I found myself comparing it to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. After all, both works are accounts of travel writing, or writing-about-travel, and are set mostly, well, on the road. Both stories take on the myth of The American Dream and tear it apart. Jason Spangler, in his essay “We're on a road to nowhere: Steinbeck, Kerouac, and the legacy of the great depression,” apparently thought the same thing. He asserts that “On the Road is informed by Depression-era anxieties of what America represents as opposed to what it might and should represent.”

Kerouac lived through the 1930s, and even had a recurring nightmare involving being chased by a “Shrouded Stranger,” a figure who is arguably the personification of the Great Depression “with its mysterious origin and unjustified vengefulness,” and proof of Kerouac’s “anxiety born of a youth spent in the throes of socioeconomic decline.” It is no surprise, then, that Kerouac, a “child of the 1930s,” would have such strong echoes of the Great Depression in his work, even though it is set in the 1950s.

Spangler points out a number of thematic similarities between On the Road and Grapes of Wrath. Main characters in both works, for example – hipsters and dustbowlers alike – dream of stability: Rose of Sharon talks to Ma about living in a town with Connie, and owning their own store; Sal tells his friends about wanting to find a girl to marry “so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old,” expressing his desire for an end to “all this franticness and jumping around” (Kerouac, 116). Sal and Dean often run into hoboes and Okies during their travels, in saloons or while hitchhiking. These minor characters’ stories serve to “raise the specter of the Great Depression in the collective memory,” and are Kerouac’s nod to the “struggles of the 1930s migrant” of Steinbeck’s work. Sal even does a stint working as a cotton picker, living in a tent next to “a whole family of Okie cotton pickers” whose forebears had moved the family west in a jalopy during the 1930s. Kerouac also invokes Steinbeck’s extreme dislike (to put it lightly) for the police and other keepers of authority, making the character of a barracks guard into a disgusting sadist who eagerly recounts his tales of beating men whose blood leaves “stains on the wall” (Kerouac, 66).

Finally, both great works of literature rail against the “deprivation of socioeconomic collapse and the disease of conformity that masquerades as solidarity,” creating main characters (Tom and Sal, respectively) who exist as figures of romanticized rebellion against the State and the existing social order.