Themes and Literary Style
Like nearly all of Kerouac's works, Visions of Cody involves a "mythologizing" of his life, here as "Jack Duluoz", renaming characters and imposing grander themes on actual events while rapturously describing the mundane around him. It is also heavily focused on his perception of and relationship to Neal Cassady, renamed "Cody Pomeray." According to Kerouac, the book represented a vertical metaphysical study of Cassady as a character and its relationship to the general America. Continuing to experiment with the spontaneous prose method he had outlined in 1950, he aimed to find "the wild form that can grow with my wild heart". The tape recorder transcriptions injects the presence of speech into the text. The style has been described as New Journalism fifteen years early. There are several meta passages in the book in which Kerouac in the words of Allen Ginsberg "writes about writing", at one point in French. Donald Allen states that the book seems self-consciously unfinished in order to convey 'an undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea words'.
Read more about this topic: Visions Of Cody
Famous quotes containing the words themes, literary and/or style:
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction, as even to excite a murmur among the zealots.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)
“Sometimes among our more sophisticated, self-styled intellectuals—and I say self-styled advisedly; the real intellectual I am not sure would ever feel this way—some of them are more concerned with appearance than they are with achievement. They are more concerned with style then they are with mortar, brick and concrete. They are more concerned with trivia and the superficial than they are with the things that have really built America.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)