Odysseus’ Nest: American Identity and the Obsession with Territorial Mobility in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and “The Dharma Bums”

Abstract

This article examines the restless mobility at the heart of Jack Kerouac’s "On the Road" and "The Dharma Bums" as a cultural and spatial problem rooted in the American identity. The paper situates Kerouac’s nomadic protagonists within a tradition where movement across space becomes both an act of resistance and a symptom of cultural schizophrenia. Kerouac’s ceaseless East-West and North-South trajectories echo the Odyssean myth of return. Yet, the impossibility of a final home destabilises the very notion of belonging, mirroring the ambivalent nature of American identity itself. While previous studies have explored Kerouac through the lenses of exile, mobility, and nomadism, few have interrogated the schizophrenic dynamics of space and identity shaping his narratives. This article extends these approaches by employing post-structural and postcolonial theories—drawing on Lefebvre’s production of space, Deleuze’s becoming, Bhabha’s hybridity, and Said’s cultural critique—to reveal how Kerouac’s restless cartographies expose contradictions at the core of American cultural production. By linking spatial movement to the politics of identity, exile, and resistance, the paper reveals how Kerouac embodies a minority position through the notion of space, where mobility transforms into both a critique of national myths and a search for alternative cultural geographies in literary expression.