Importance of Mountains in Kerouacs Dharma Bums and Barthelmes The Gl

Importance of Mountains in Kerouacs Dharma Bums and Barthelmes The Glass Mountain Mountains are pregnant in the writing of Jack Kerouac and Donald Barthelme as symbolic representations of makement and the closing off of an individual from the masses of the working(a) class in alter capitalistic American society. The mountains, depicted by Kerouac and Barthelme, rise above the American landscape painting as majestic entities whose peaks are touched by few unchangeable and brave souls. The mountains of Kerouacs The Dharma Bums symbolize personal freedom and accomplishment through achieving a connection with nature distant from the constraints of materialism and a polluted industrialized American society. Barthelmes Glass Mountain, however, envisions a mountain removed from nature as a modern skyscraper office building, an edifice that embodies the degradation of an emerging American society in the 1960s that is in search of the American envisage through material o r monetary gains. The Glass Mountain remarks on the movement of Americans away from nature, religion, and tender-heartedity as they look to false easy idols (the golden castle at the jacket of the mountain) for inspiration to be successful, time Kerouacs The Dharma Bums emphasizes a return to nature and devout religiousness to inspire virtues of charity, kindness, humility, zeal, tranquility, wisdom, and hug drug (p. 5). The top of the mountain, for both authors, represents a fearful ascent from the masses of the working class huddled in polluted cities in order to achieve a heightened state of knowledge and success, but both explorers fall before long of true fulfillment because they are never far removed from human flaws of greed, excess, and materia... ...est of the world from the top is better than actually doing it. The mountains also represent the compete of the lower classes in American society to achieve wealth for the interest of happiness and fulfillm ent. What Americans seeking wealth do not realize is that the top is a lonely place, devoid of the longing for material possession that keeps them breathing out in life. The thrill of climbing the mountain, or the corporate ladder, is always more rewarding than looking down from the top to see the ugliness of the city below and regretting that they must return to this ugliness of competition and greed in order to sustain their own pitiful human existence. Bibliography Barthelme, Donald. The Glass Mountain. The radical American Poetry., Allen, Donald, ed. Berkeley, Ca. U. Calif. Press, 1999. Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York Penguin., 1976.