Abstract

This paper is an analysis of On the Road (1957) written by Jack Kerouac (1922-1962), the celebrated twentieth-century American writer, utilising Foucauldian concepts of madness, power and resistance. In Foucauldian views, there is a dichotomy between sanity and madness in which the former is always regarded as superior to the latter. The objectives of this paper are to present a new positive concept of madness in contrast to society's common views of madness in order to deconstruct the dichotomy of madness and sanity, and give birth to a new strategy of resistance to the 1950s American cultural codes. In view of this, we provide a new definition of resistance to the Foucauldian concept of resistance to clarify the new strategy of the protagonists, Sal and Dean. Kerouac's protagonists select madness with its pleasures over sanity with its sadness; hence, we hypothesise that the madness presented in On the Road is regarded as resistance to the 1950s American cultural codes. Therefore, we have found that, in this context, the relationship between Foucauldian concepts of madness and resistance is madness as resistance to the cultural and social codes of America in the 1950s.