ABSTRACT
Free from the marketplace structure, the main characters of Auster, Jarmusch and Waits engage in a never ending (and never successful) search for an alternative way of living, delivered in the most traditional American narrative trope: the road. The road books, road movies and road songs of these authors offer a revision of the classic American myths of Nature, Freedom and the New Man. Through a reading of their road genre adaptations, I suggest that these works generate an artistic resistance to the ideologies of the American Dream and the Manifest Destiny and to the values of the Reaganite era – the very era in which their artistic personalities fully flourished. This is especially evident in the disparagement of America’s landscape often presented through an ugly, exploited and menacing nature. Their vision of freedom espouses a left libertarianism in which the values of individual freedom and social justice co-exist, despite their incompatibility in the age of neoliberalism. A renewed version of the myth of the “new man”, his rebirth and self-discovery is delivered in Auster, Jarmusch and Waits. Leslie Fiedler’s The Return of the Vanishing American (1968) informs this part of the book theorising the romantic idea of the perpetual journey of the American man, which is very much present in all three authors.
