Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were the
             galvanizing forces
            
             behind the Beat Generation. Their writings and revolutionary narrative
             techniques
            
             created a national sensation that is still debated in modern literary
             circles. Although each
            
             of these writers authored a great many distinctive novels and poems, the
             focus of this
            
             examination will be an analysis of On the Road, Howl, and Naked Lunch.
             Essentially,
            
             these works imprinted each of the aforementioned writer's footprints in the
             American
            
             literary landscape of the mid-twentieth century. Although each of these
             writers gave
            
             credence to a "beat" movement in literature during the 1950's, perhaps
             Kerouac's On the
            
             Road reflects the most respected work of the bunch.
            
             On the Road, at first glance seems incoherent, but as the novel
             progresses, we discover
            
             that the story moves from a superficial sense of order to a deeper, more
             penetrating sense
            
             of openness. The narrative is an experience so that an open-ended approach
             is
            
             appropriate. The narrator's desire to keep it open-ended is evident in the
             first paragraph
            
             where to render events of a happier part of his life without as much as
             possible,
            
             contaminating his feelings about other parts of his life. For instance,
             "With the coming
            
             of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you would call my life on the
             road" (Kerouac
            
             5). In essence, Kerouac's narrator suggests that his true existential life
             begins after a bad
            
             break-up, and that there is no necessary destination that can be ordered or
             planned, as was
            
             the case with is former life. This narrated experience also maintains
             consistency in the
            
             narrator's final assimilation of events with the moment of dramatization.
             In the book's
            
             last paragraph, the narrator continues in the present tense, "So in America
             when the sun
            
             goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier," (253) we can
             re...