Belonging In Immigrant Chronicle, And On The Road

Belonging Essay – “Who we are and how we belong is a choice”

When we construct an identity for ourselves, we are constantly shaped by our choices. To where and how we belong is ultimately one of those choices, through which we develop our sense of self. In this development of ourselves, we often search for a feeling of belonging to culture, places, and groups, but are hindered from constructing a sense of self by barriers to belonging such as racial and cultural prejudice, violence, hypocrisy, and oppression. If and when these barriers are overcome, the individual is allowed to grow and belong on a more universal level. “Immigrant Chronicle” by Peter Skrzynecki and “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac both show this sense of the construction of
In “Feliks Skrzynecki”, the poet writes “His Polish friends/Always shook hands too violently,/ I thought… Feliks Skrzynecki,/ That formal address/ I never got used to.” Here the poet is establishing a disconnection to culture through the people, whom behaved in a manner that he never got used to. This said, in “10 Mary Street”, Peter very much feels a sense of connection to his Polish heritage, but it seems ironically to be his connection to other migrants, his parents’ friends, which allows him to construct a sense of self. His dislocation from culture is because he has an inability to relate to this ideal nation about which his parents talk, except through the friends of “10 Mary Street” who “drink to freedom/ Under the White Eagle’s flag”. This cultural belonging through relationships with individuals allows Skrzynecki to construct a sense of belonging to self. “On the Road”, too, speaks primarily of a friendship between Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, and they feel a strong sense of connection to one another; however, they both feel isolated from other important figures in their life. Dean is constantly searching for his absent father, and Sal is searching for relationship in the context of romantic love, expressed in the lines “’I want to marry a girl,’ I told them, ‘so I can rest my soul with her till we both get old. This can’t go on all the time – all this franticness and jumping around.” He expresses in these lines an explicit plea for love through the usage of the novel’s characteristic first person, informal, internal monologue style, also expressing simply Sal’s desire for consistency, and a steady home to rely on, through the relationship with his wife. In contrast, “The