The Struggle between the Dharma Bums and the Police: A Foucauldian Reading of The Dharma Bums

Abstract

This study aimed to examine and analyze the novel The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac based on the political theory of Michel Foucault. This semi-fictional account is the story of search for the original experience and enlightenment and introduces the character of Gary Snyder as Japhy Ryder who is a poet, critical thinker, philosopher and political radical, and Ray Smith, the alter ego of Jack Kerouac himself. The main focus would be on Foucault’s conceptions of power, power relations, institutions, normalization, and surveillance. This study will also seek to provide a true understanding of the life and times of Jack Kerouac. Moreover, it represents the cultural, political, and historical background based on which Kerouac had written his work. Kerouac’s novel represents the spirit of the age of a people who sought change, difference, and disobedience; the main characters are antiheroes who challenge their prisonlike structure of the society. In contrast, the government has the upper hand by means of its distinct and overlapping institutions that not only neutralize such acts or resistances but make normal and ordinary those individuals who were themselves the promoters and examples of abnormality.