University of St Andrews

The narrator of Kerouac’s On The Road (1957) recalls a moment when they wake up in a motel room and conceive of themselves as a ghost. The scene suggests that this is not because they have forgotten where they are but because they have forgotten who they are. This troubling moment of self-assessment is later reflected in characters who similarly see themselves as ghosts during their pursuit of post-war pleasures revolving around, music, drink, sex, and the freedom of physical movement that America could ostensibly provide. The book’s superficial suggestion that the way out is also the way in (an inner life and its desires now met) is compromised in these moments which suggest that in reality they involve the loss of self. The journey across America underpins this sense of loss as America appears as a Gothic space of potential danger. How to maintain a sense of self in explicitly post-apocalyptic terrains is the subject matter of later, more obviously Gothic, texts such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Jim Crace’s Pesthouse (2007). Like On The Road they too are focused on how to maintain the self when the environment which produced that self no longer exists. McCarthy and Crace’s texts thus directly explore how environmental issues underpin models of subjectivity which have their roots in Kerouac’s model of being on the road, as a journey about an eroded sense of self. How these ideas relate to a Gothic ecology and theories of ecocriticism and notions of the home are the principal issues addressed in this paper.