Jack Kerouac is the first to explore the world of the wandering hoboes in his novel, On the Road. He created a world that shows the lives and motivations of this culture he himself named the "Beats." Kerouac saw the beats as people who rebel against everything accepted to gain freedom and expression. Although he has been highly criticized for his lack of writing skills, he made a novel that is both realistic and enjoyable to read. He has a complete disregard for developed of plot or characters, yet his descriptions are incredible. Kerouac's novel On the Road defined the post World War II generation known as the "beats."
             The motivation behind the beat movement was their thirst for freedom. They desired freedom from almost everything we take for granted today. "Central to the beat writers, though little noticed, is the desperate flight from the lower middle class life and its culture of anxiety" ("Jack Kerouac." Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 14, 305). The beats also had trouble dealing with the social aspects of living. "In both On The Road and The Dharma Bums this fugue, or flight, is portrayed on the realistic level as an attempt to escape from an intolerable personal or social situation" (Freied 253). They couldn't deal with the values and expectations of society. "These men and women reject existing social values largely through misunderstanding them; in the social sense, they are infantile, perversely negative or indifferent" (Baro 281). Sometimes it was theirselves they needed to escape from. Freied states, "Kerouac's hoboes are seeking escape- escape not only from the threats of a hostile society, but escape from their own inadequate personalities and unsatisfactory human relationships" (295). What most of the need for escape amounts to is an outlet from life. "Their much touted ideal of freedom is in reality a fr...