The Catholicism of Jack Kerouac

Sorrell, Richard S.

Observations of Jack Kerouac's ethnoreligious background - Franco American and Roman Catholic - and what the author describes as one of three "panels of the survivance triptych" : Catholicism. Historical descriptions of the role and actions of the Roman Catholic Church in historic New France, French Canada, Québec, and later in Franco American communities like Kerouac's Lowell, Massachusetts. Franco Catholicism's Jansenist and Manichean tendencies as rooted in early French North American history. Kerouac's early devotion and later rebellion from Catholic practice, with an ever persistent reflection of and fascincation with select observably Catholic conditions and attitudes, including the themes of guilt and suffering apparent in his recorded life and works. Shades of Catholicism in "Beat Movement" mystical and anti-material mores, and intersections with Kerouac's attentions to Buddhism. Selected revelations of Kerouac's interior life, sexual life, and moral concerns as found in his literature and in select quotation.

1982-spr

en

Journal article

1930-1970

Lowell, Massachusetts

New York, New York

0008-4298

Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses

11

2

189-200