Exploration of Spirituality in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums

Abstract

This paper endeavours to advance new readings of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums in a contemporary cultural and literary context. It is specifically dealt with a deconstructive study of his writing and preoccupied with his negotiations of spirituality within the structure of Post-War America’s accelerated culture. Kerouac’s liability to the modernist approaches after all, this paper contends that in its thematic and historical engrossments Kerouac’s writing is evidently proficient with postmodern approaches. It also traces the narrator’s search for spiritual enlightenment as portrayed in The Dharma Bums which engages with a discussion of Buddhism as a possible means of spiritual salvation. Having foregrounded the novel’s Buddhist concerns, the study looks at the ways in which the idea of spiritual salvation through Buddhism poses a challenge to conventional patterns of western thought. Creating the mutual understanding between Buddhism and deconstructive doctrines, how the two interact in an analysis of The Dharma Bums.