A Fold in the Road: Kerouac and the Temporal-Spatial Construction of Street Corner as Place in On the Road

Jack Kerouac's On the Road is both a travel story and a cultural event. Although road narratives have been critically examined from numerous angles, few studies have addressed how time and space are arranged in the written representation of lives encountered on the road. The individuals who populate street corners are an integral part of American culture and can offer a colorful snapshot of local lives to those traveling through. This article discusses examples of street corners in On the Road to question how this “folded” time and space can be used to explain the folding together of lives in the writing of a journey. In so doing the article draws on Bakhtin's theory of the chronotope and Deleuze's description of the fold to help explain Kerouac's arrangements of time and space as the “chronotope of the street corner.”