Jack Kerouac Dharma Bums p.24-49

Jack Kerouac Dharma Bums
Page: 31

“You know when I was a little kid in Oregon I didn’t feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values… and my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything especially freedom. ”

In this quote, Japhy/Snyder says everything we have said about suburbia. An outsider free of the “ideal” he sees the flaws the repression, the conformity, and the very fakeness of it all. He sees all of this so-called perfection or American Ideal for the huge void it is. He practically calls the American dream a cookie-cutter of nothingness.

Jack Kerouac Dharma Bums
Page: 39

“Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and televisions sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time…”

Once again the ideas come back to suburbia perfections and outside reality. Kerouac is saying that college means nothing. It is simply another uniform aspect for uniform individualizes. He is saying it teaches nothing but how to be the same. You go for no reason except you are supposed to. It is expected. While to Kerouac, time is much better spent and more is learned through his own counterculture lifestyle.