Cependant, les grands animaux sauvages du continent américain sont presque totalement absents de ses romans, et la confrontation tant attendue avec de dangereux prédateurs n’arrive jamais, obligeant le narrateur à reformuler la relation entre masculinité et animalité. Que ce soit dans la Sierra Nevada en 1955, dans The Dharma Bums (1958), ou dans les Northern Cascades en 1956, dans Desolation Angels (1965), l’alter-ego et narrateur à la première personne de Kerouac se lance dans une fuite dans un monde animal fantasmé afin de reconquérir une identité masculine authentique loin de l’influence efféminante de la vie civilisée. Tout au long de son cycle autobiographique de quatorze romans, Jack Kerouac présente son narrateur et les protagonistes de ses récits comme des archétypes de la masculinité américaine engagés dans une lutte contre leur domestication supposée dans une société qu’ils jugent en voie de féminisation. In those two novels, his poetics revolves instead around notions of kinship and sentimentality towards smaller animals, transforming the manly ethos and the inhospitable wilderness of adventure stories of the times into a domestic world of mutual harmony and hospitality. Taking the popular hunting narratives featured in men’s adventure magazines as the dominant norm in this regard, this paper aims at showing how Kerouac’s representation of masculinity and animality strongly diverges from the erotics of male predation to be found in the “real man VS wild beast” plot. Yet, large wild animals are almost never to be found in his novels and the long-awaited encounter with deadly predators does not occur, forcing the narrator to reconfigure the relationship between masculinity and animality.

Whether it be in the Sierra Nevada in 1955, in The Dharma Bums (1958),or in the Northern Cascades in 1956, in Desolation Angels (1965), Kerouac’s alter ego and first-person narrator engages in an escapist fantasy into the animal realm where he can regain a sense of authentic masculine identity, away from the feminizing effects of domesticity and civilization. Throughout his autobiographical cycle of fourteen novels, Jack Kerouac tried to present his narrator and his protagonists as archetypes of American masculinity who fought against their perceived domestication in a society which they characterized as undergoing feminization.

Jack kerouac desolation angels review