Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
1st International Kent Symposium: City and Literature, İstanbul, Türkiye, 19 Nisan 2025, ss.31, (Özet Bildiri)
Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans, written in accordance with the stylistic principles of
Kerouac’s Essentials of Spontaneous Prose, presents San Francisco as a fragmented, fluid, and
improvisational space that mirrors the existential dislocation of its characters. This paper
explores how Kerouac’s narrative, shaped by his commitment to unfiltered expression,
rhythmic spontaneity, and jazz-like improvisation, constructs the city as an extension of the
protagonist’s psychological and emotional turbulence. The novel’s breathless, unstructured
sentences and lack of traditional narrative pauses capture the restless movement of San
Francisco’s underground culture, particularly its Beat enclaves of North Beach and the
Tenderloin. Furthermore, the city is depicted as a liminal space of racial and social fluidity, as
seen in the central relationship between Leo Percepied and Mardou Fox. Through an analysis
of urban transience, jazz’s influence on Kerouac’s prose, and the erasure of conventional
literary form, this study argues that The Subterraneans transforms the city into both a liberating
and alienating force, exemplifying the ways in which spontaneous prose redefines the literary
representation of urban space.