Its easy to forget, but the United States of America is bound together by the most advanced circulation system

on the planet. Its made of networks, and millions of them. The surface is covered with asphalt highways. The sky is scored with the vapor trails of jets. Deep within the earth move subways and sewage systems. Our breath vibrates with radio waves sent from Outer Space. Everything is wired in some way or another into one big circulatory system. The American experience is one of bewildering connectivity- quote to back it up. What really defines America, however, is the road, the most prominent of its circulatory systems. In one form or another, strips of asphalt run into the lives of every American. City dwellers live on streets. Country folk live off of highways. Even its wilderness is defined in terms of the nearest road (1). Within this system race millions of automobiles, moving at various speeds during both day and night. Each is operated by an individual owner, and each owner uses his or her vehicle to fulfill a wide variety of dreams and desires. What this fleet of 300 million vehicles shares is a vision of open spaces that is exclusive to this corner of the world. Its not simply that Americans insist on measuring by feet. Its people interpret movement, space, and even time in a profoundly unique way. It all started with the utopia of imagination, dreamt by pioneering Americans who sought to establish enough circulation to saturate the continent with settlements and develop it into a network of healthy agrarian communities. The work in 1800 with Thomas Jefferson, and for a century America busied itself with expanding circulation systems and using them to populate the country. By 1900, there was no more roomthe continent had been settledhowever, Americans had spent so long building and expanding circulation systems that the labor itself had they had forgotten to enjoy the harmony of its flow. They could not stop building, expanding, and establishing circulating, and that was the fatal flaw in Jeffersons plan: fulfilling Manifest Destiny had taken long that, by the time it was completed, nobody remembered why destiny theyd set off the manifest in the first place. Jefferson-era ideals were outdated; Americans now worshiped at the altars of engineering and efficiency. The history of Americans dashing away from Jeffersons ideals is an impatient one, flavored with overconfidence and zeal. These quirks would first drive settlers across the continent, beat down the wandering paths of covered wagons, and guarantee the survival of the settlements left along the way. Eventually, a cross-continental railroad would open the floodgates of the Great West and populate the scope of the old frontier by the end of the twentieth century. For nearly three centuries the dominant fact in American life has been expansion, wrote Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, and the quintessential American man never knew not where he was going, but he was on his way, cheerful, optimistic, busy and buoyant. This story of Americas paradigm shift is not the focus of this study, but rather an enormous feat in engineering that marked the first decades of the twentieth centurythe automobile highway

and the ways in which two American authors attempted to handle the shockwaves it sent through American culture. John Steinbeck (1902-1968) would attempt to define movement along Americas roads in his classic, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) would update this definition in his own road narrative, On the Road (1959). It is important to remember that these authors didnt take on a rolling, unstable setting for a blithe narrative challenge. The American highway insisted itself because of its recent expansion across the continent that occurred under a unique set of circumstances, later discussed, and allowed Americans to turn expiring frontier values into a permanent system offering one set of promises after another, with the easy recession and happy forgetfulness of a moving perspective (Patton 13). It is also important to remember that the novels represent two distinct time periods marked by their own set of cultural and historical circumstances. The authors, however, use the same roads to help narrate a number of paradigm shifts that are shared in regards to instinct, expression, and principle. These shifts are so congruent, in fact, that it is easy to distinguish those that inhabit the road yet do not necessarily run between both time periods. For example, Steinbecks roads are fraught with Great Depression anxiety while Kerouacs are shadowed by post-World War II atomic threat, and these historical circumstances host differing perspectives particularly regarding financial stability, the roles of women, and conceptions of obligation to society. There is a particular attachment to and relationship with the NATURAL WORLD, which resurfaces throughout the novels both as an ideal buried in modern culture and as a physical barrier to the movement exerted by that culture. More specifically, the lost ideals are commonly associated with those of North Americas indigenous cultures and the physical barriers to movement associated with those of rain and autumn. MOVEMENT has a number of advantages and disadvantages shared by the novels, ranging from epiphany to motion sickness. More specifically, epiphany is commonly a vision of America and Mankind bound under the same abiding spirit while motion sickness induces common feelings of juvenile helplessness, low existential confidence, and a numbing of emotion. This movement has always been a uniquely-American hunger and its highway system a set of clues to the constantly receding mystery of nationality (Patton 13). Both authors were familiar with this, and they consciously explored the primary cause, unbridled expression, and narrative inclusion of what was a literally concrete expression of the central American drives (12). Specifically, the primary cause was the natural landscape, the unbridled expression a prophet, and its place in national narrative taken care of by each novels protagonist.

In conclusion, both novels deal with an uneasy feeling that movement had become disposition and migration [turned into] circulation and that movement had become a neurotic equilibrium for Americans. This is simply the end of the road for Americas pursuit of happiness on the frontier and the resulting tradition of establishing circulatory flows.