Vibrant matter, mobile assemblages: Reading nonhuman agency in Jack Kerouac’s on the Road through Jane Bennett’s new materialism

Abstract

This article aims to explore Jack Kerouac’s (1957) On the Road through the lens Jane Bennett’s (2010) theory of vibrant materiality, arguing that the novel’s myth of individual freedom is repeatedly interrupted and reorganized by the active force of nonhuman matter. Most humanist interpretations of the text, such as geographical and cultural studies of Beat mobility (Cresswell, 1993; Valente, 2024), view Sal Paradise’s and Dean Moriarty’s travel across the States as an expression of freedom of the will against a complacent American “landscape.” Instead, this study proposes that mobility within the novel is to be regarded as a continuous and uneven production of assemblages of human bodies, automobiles, roads, weather, and strangers, each producing a force, or “thing-power” that helps shape the direction and nature of the journey. Drawing on Bennett’s (2010) notions of thing-power, assemblage, and trajectory, and situating these within new materialist theory (Latour, 2005; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; Gamble et al., 2019; Ejsing, 2024) and automobility/mobilities scholarship (Hellberg et al., 2024), the article traces four recurring patterns: the failure of human plans before the resistant materiality of road and weather; the car as co-driving actant rather than inert object; self-generating trajectories of assemblage in scenes of crash and rescue; and material entanglement of embodied selfhood. On the Road redistributes agency across a dynamic ecology of lively things, offering a materialist corrective to canonical readings of the Beat road narrative and a contribution to the growing dialogue between new materialism and literary studies (Musgrave, 2023; Vint, 2020).