- 1 Her mother, Joan Haverty, the model for the character Laura in On the Road, met Jack Kerouac in Man (...)
- 2 Jack Kerouac was married three times: in 1946 to art student Edie Parker, which lasted less than tw (...)
- 3 We also acknowledge the contributions of Jim Jones’ biographical study of Jan Kerouac, in Use My Na (...)
- 4 In the following pages the title will be referred to as Baby Driver.
1Jack Kerouac famously gave birth to a generation of writers and travellers inspired by the freewheeling spirit of his iconic travel texts. His status as one of the “fathers” of the American road narrative genre was firmly established by his seminal text On the Road (1957), which catapulted him to fame. “This iconic narrative of the (white) American (male) Fifties counterculture is one of the best-known literary works of the Beat movement. It is also part of the quintessential American ‘road’ tradition, from Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the counterculture road movie par excellence, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969)” (Michlin 87). Surprisingly few scholars are aware that he was also the biological father to Janet Michelle Kerouac, born in New York in 1952,1 and a published author. Considering the lack of recognition surrounding the life and work of the daughter of such a celebrated father, it is worth devoting attention to Jan Kerouac, the author. Gathering information about Jack’s only child2 is a challenge, precisely because of this scant academic attention. What we do know is largely3 thanks to Gerald Nicosia’s biographical works, including his notice in the Dictionary of Literary Biography and his 2009 publication, Jan Kerouac: A Life in Memory, written, he states in the introduction, in an attempt to avoid Jan Kerouac being “erased from literary history” (Nicosia 13). “Adventure twitched in my feet” (Jan Kerouac 116), admits the narrator in Baby Driver, a Story About Myself,4 published in 1981 (but no longer in print). These words conjure up the profound restlessness that inhabits her, and in many ways, drives her work. This article will explore Jan Kerouac’s autobiographical novel, Baby Driver, to examine how fractured lines shape the narrative and generate much of its poetry. We aim to illustrate that the shifting, horizontal lines of her constant journeying intersect with the vertical lineages connecting her to both her father and her daughter, forming a pattern of rifts.
2This essay sets out to decenter the traditional masculinized treatment of road narratives such as Ronald Primeau’s Romance of the Road: the Literature of the American Highway (1996). This important study theorised the American road narrative tradition, establishing recognised tropes of the genre but clearly positioned women’s writing on the periphery, somehow reducing the parameters of the central mythical quest:
American road narratives by women slow the pace, rechart the itineraries and reassess the goals within the conventions of the typical road quest… Women bring a calming influence to the American road. With not as many highs to seek and maintain, the accompanying lows are modulated. The quest is not so manic. (Primeau 115-6)
3Primeau does refer to Baby Driver as an “important road protest” (Primeau 47) in the tradition of the Beat road books but does not elaborate further. This article is informed by the body of work by feminist literary scholars who have, since Primeau, brought critical attention to women’s voices of road literature, the “invisible outsiders” (Paes de Barros 11). This growing body of critical study invites us compellingly to reconsider women’s travel narratives. Rather than seeing them as minor adaptations of traditional male road stories, complete with their linear journey structure, we're encouraged to approach them from a decentered standpoint. For example, the marginalized positioning of women travel narratives such as found in Primeau’s inaugural study has since been dismantled by critics like Deborah Paes de Barros in her study of nomadic theory and contemporary feminism, Fast Cars and Bad Girls. Nomadic Subjects and Women’s Road Stories (2004). Susan L. Roberson demonstrates how women authors have crafted their own narratives of mobility, reflecting their personal and political perspectives on movement and exploration, in Antebellum American Women Writers and the Road. American Mobilities (2010). Sidonie Smith’s Moving Lives: Twentieth-Century Women’s Travel Writing addresses the forms of desire that have propelled women on the road in 20th century women’s texts. Alexander Ganser has studied women’s road narratives through the prism of feminist cultural geography to reveal the power dynamics within them in Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women's Road Narratives, 1970-2000 (2009). It is this invitation to decenter that we take up in our study of Jan Kerouac. In doing so, we aim to support the prevention of her erasure from literary history, while contributing to the archive building of women’s road narratives.
- 5 Trainsong (1988) chronicles her adult years, a second failed marriage and more of her nomadic exist (...)
- 6 I am indebted to Professor Benjamin Van Wyk de Vries, a researcher from our laboratory Magma et Vol (...)
4We have focused more closely on Baby Driver in our corpus than on Jan Kerouac’s two other novel-length texts, Trainsong (1988) and Parrot Fever (published posthumously in 2000).5 It stands out for the period that it covers, offering insights into her early initiation into road culture, her relationship with her father and, importantly for our investigation, her distinctly unmodulated experience of losing a child while on the road. Baby Driver (1981) traces the life of Jan Kerouac, recounting her turbulent journey to self-discovery, much of it spent on the road. This study will put forward the idea that not only does Jan Kerouac’s writing capture the exhilarating freedom that comes with being behind the wheel, in a style that echoes that of her father, but that it carves out a very personal subtext into the profound ways in which the road exposes vulnerabilities, uncovering the hidden fractures and flaws within. In Baby Driver, we will suggest, Jan Kerouac portrays the diverse influences that shape and meld human existence, constantly tugging and pushing against our very being, our human crust.6 We shall explore how this little known “daughter of” writes of the fault-lines running through life’s journeys including the devastating experience of being a bereaved mother.
5Baby Driver overlaps memoir and travel narrative, merging personal introspection with the appeal of travel storytelling. It traces her childhood, her rebellious adolescence, and her itinerant life on the road, and it is a wild, chaotic trip. The reader follows Jan as she hurtles from drug addiction, detention homes, probation, and being pregnant in the Mexican tropics at age 15. The narrative proceeds to relate Jan Kerouac’s spell in the peace movement in Haight-Ashbury and Washington State, diverse jobs such as waitress, stable hand, maid and, for a brief period, sex worker, and the narrative climaxes with a tumultuous bus trip through Central America accompanied by a threateningly possessive, paranoid lover.
6We would suggest that Jan Kerouac’s work has been overlooked and could be deserving of a place in the academic landscape of travel writing, particularly of women’s road narratives. The singularity of her voice lies partly in the way that she speaks of the road as a site of self-actualization, the sort of female emancipatory ride that we have come to associate with the regendering performed by second-wave feminist narratives of mobility such as the road movie, Thelma and Louise which, as Jessica Envold has analysed, demonstrates that women are “mobilized, active and empowered subjects” (Envold ii). Equally significant is her deeply honest depiction of how the disruptions of the road can unveil human vulnerabilities, most notably the nuanced experiences of a woman navigating such challenges.
7Baby Driver should first be contextualized within the relationship between father and daughter, which is marked by a noticeable sense of disconnection. On the 25th anniversary of Jan Kerouac’s death, David Barnett confirmed in The Guardian that Jan Kerouac, “who was free-spirited and self-destructive like her father, has almost been entirely erased from his story.” The article describes how Jan Kerouac’s existence remains conspicuously absent from Jack Kerouac’s works, and how her own writing career and struggle for recognition, complicated by her father's estate, reflect a legacy marred by rupture and omission. Her tragic life, plagued by alcoholism and drug abuse, parallels her father’s destructive path.
8This pattern of omission occurs even within academic projects intended to provide visibility for the “daughters” of the road narrative genre. For instance, a rare mention of Jan Kerouac’s existence and of her place in the road narrative genre is to be found in the anthology of women’s road texts edited by Elinor Nauen, Ladies, start your engines. Women writers on cars and the road, (1996), only to be immediately dismissed. In her introduction Nauen justifies her editorial choice to omit certain authors such as Jan Kerouac, claiming that particular genres don’t stand up to excerpting. On the other hand, she insists on the feminist project of the anthology which, she claims, “rebuts the idea that only guys, only Jack Kerouac’s sons, can go on the road” (Nauen xvi). It seems rather a missed opportunity, and rather ironic, omitting Kerouac’s own actual daughter from an anthology defending a mandate to make women’s road narratives more visible.
- 7 According to Jan Kerouac’s biographer, Gerald Nicosia, Jan’s mother, Joan Haverty Kerouac, took Jac (...)
9This father-daughter disconnection in life reverberates throughout the text of Baby Driver. Jan Kerouac’s personal experience of the line between her and her iconic father is fraught with blanks and silences. Her “lost, hobo father” (30) as she refers to him, inhabits the text like a ghost, his audible absence regularly making itself heard. In the narrative, he occupies a space of emptiness and a longing that she camps lightly and humorously as when she describes receiving in the mail her monthly child allowance check. It amounts to the legal minimum of fifty-two dollars required by law.7 This payment document, she jokingly notes, is “autographed by the famous wino himself” (3), a line that both acknowledges his public notoriety as a successful author and his inadequacy as a father. In the next sentence, she expresses the unfulfilled yearning for the connection she dreams of forging with her father: “Someday maybe I’ll go back and see him, be drinking buddies together…” (3). The writer Jim Jones sums up succinctly Jan’s estrangement from her famous literary father: “too much like him, and too far distant from him” (17). It is a father–daughter rift that Jan attempts to knit around and build into a tangible sense of identity, even if it is one that seems somewhat unsurmountable. She recalls meeting her father for the first time as a child, the momentousness of the event reinforced by a simultaneous historic event: “It was the day the first astronaut went up in space” (63). The rarity of the father-daughter encounter is associated with a certain rite of passage: “I remember a certain gullible part of my young mind thinking that nine and a half must be an age when one was grown up enough to meet one’s father for the first time. It meant I was maturing—a big girl now” (63). Even if the occasion turns out to be less auspicious than hoped for, young Jan cannot help but be her father’s staunch supporter. He chooses to take her and her mother to a bar, a decision the young Jan delights in. “I thought it was a great idea, wanting as I did, to be in accord with this naughty bummish fellow” (63). She records meeting him one other time, when he tells her: “Yeah, you go to Mexico, an’ write a book. Use my name” (185). The paternal blessing is followed. She takes him at his word and respects the filial bond, leading a nomadic lifestyle in the pursuit of personal freedom. As she journeys southwards, traversing Ecuador and Peru, her narrative serves as a tool for probing the intricacies and boundaries of this freedom, “[d]own, down, down,—now I was really going down” (158). Her depiction of life on the road is an exploration of varied terrains, sometimes imbued with urgency, such as when she is “racing through sand rose cactus pastel coast deserts” (158). At other moments, her narrative conveys a sense of languidness, as she puts it, “my meandering on this mysterious continent” (189).
10Despite this rift, Jan Kerouac’s itinerant lifestyle echoes her father’s, as does her use of recording her journeying through the landscapes of both physical terrains and personal experiences. Her descriptions of the road and the metaphorical bumps and cracks that render this travel text such a raucous ride call for exploration.
11Throughout the narrative, the journeys undertaken by Jan Kerouac and her various travel companions are marked by a sense of unpredictability and disorder. Characterised by unforeseen detours, breakdowns and rough, bumpy rides, these trips unfold erratically and haphazardly. Plotting the geographical trajectories she undertakes would be a challenge. They are neither linear nor circular but they crisscross the United States and South America. The structural movement of the narrative also constantly shifts. Chapters fluidly oscillate, moving both backward and forward in time. They paint a vivid picture of the narrator's nomadic existence, capturing constant house moves during her childhood and frequent relocations for temporary employment or for a lover’s sake. Through these dynamic shifts, Jan Kerouac revels in the untethered lifestyle on the road—the “raunchy delight of careless car existence” (44)—, embracing its multitude of surprises and unforeseen twists, while encapsulating the exhilaration that comes with a life unbound by societal constraints.
12An instance of such exhilarating “delight” accompanied by its alluring undertones, unfolds during a memorable car breakdown incident at a time in her life when Jan, the narrator, resides and works in New Mexico. As she embarks on her journey, Jan describes the contagious thrill and exuberance that fills her being. It is a heady concoction of emotions, ignited by the sensation of controlling a magnificent, powerful vehicle. This stirs within her a sense of adventure, mirroring the audacity and confidence that defined Marco Polo's legendary journeys:
Bounding along, flashing past saguaros in my silver Caddy, serenaded by Willie Nelson wailing in the desert air … never felt so free. I had $800 dollars, and I was going back to Santa Fe. Playing hide and seek with truck drivers now on my merry way back to the mountain refuge, I was like Marco Polo bringing home wondrous bounty to amaze the folks back home. (89)
13However, her Cadillac suffers a burst tire, and needs replacing with a new set of tires at a local garage. This leads to a sexual encounter with a garage attendant that would rival any of her father’s hook ups for its insouciance and casualness. The atmosphere crackles with undeniable tension, brimming with a mix of spontaneity and carefree indulgence:
On the way I had a brief rendezvous in Holbrook, caused by a blistered tire. Speeding into the small town I heard a sharp FLAP of rubber and had to pull into a gas station. Standing there in hotpants and heels, massage parlour written all over me, I’d gotten into a chat with the attendant. We made a deal: four brand-new tires in return for a night of fun and games - maybe even a massage. In the morning, after exchanging addresses and planning to meet again some time, I took off for the New Mexican border, riding high and smooth in my Caddy with its new shoes. (89)
14Jan finds herself not only intoxicated by sexual desire but equally electrified by the acquisition of a new set of tires. Interestingly, she draws a striking parallel between tires and shoes, recognizing their unexpectedly shared symbolism as potent agents of eroticism. Like shoes, tires here have the transformative ability to instantly boost one’s confidence and allure. They become a metaphorical manifestation of the narrative’s themes of liberation and self-discovery. Jan’s vivid comparison highlights the intertwined nature of desire, personal transformation, and the exhilarating liberation experienced through both sexual encounters and the tangible elements of her nomadic lifestyle. As Mimi Pond remarks humorously in Shoes Never Lie, “Shoes are totems of disembodied lust. They are candy for the eyes, poetry for the feet, icing on your soul. They stand for everything you’ve ever wanted: glamour, success, a rapier-like wit, a date with the Sex God of your choice….” (Pond 15). Detached from any moral question, Jan not only expresses triumph in finding a practical solution to her predicament but also in satisfying her sexual desires in the process. This celebration of self-reliance and autonomy stands in direct opposition to the conventional portrayal of women as damsels in distress, passively awaiting rescue in breakdown scenes. Jan’s portrayal defies stereotypes and affirms her independence, embracing a narrative that disrupts convention and challenges societal expectations. Departing from the norm, she highlights the multifaceted nature of female experiences while subverting traditional gender roles often associated with such situations. As Katherine J. Parkin has pointed out in her multidisciplinary study, Women at the Wheel. A Century of Buying, Driving and Fixing Cars, twentieth-century popular culture has been replete with judgmental critiques that effectively denied women pride in their driving abilities and car-related expertise. Despite women's long history with cars, she contends, these stereotypes persist.
15Breakdowns in Jan’s story are not limited to mechanical failure. There are other types of malfunctions, including periods when her life seems to have collapsed into low points of self-destruction often fuelled by her addictions. Her alcoholism takes over at times, leading her into mad undertakings, such as racing her car while a friend’s baby boy is lying on the passenger seat. In a lucid moment she “seriously questioned [her] sanity” (90). She crashes through this time in her existence, floundering “in a merry-go-round of Tequila Oro” (90) and ends up living in her car, “sleeping in a bundle of wreckage in the back seat under my old pink comforter while parked in various curbs in town. It was the shabbiest house I’d ever lived in” (90-91).
16At other moments in the narrative, the text lays bare the breakdowns that characterize her relationships to the men with whom she is romantically attached. Her partnerships are a series of disasters, often bound up with travel misadventures and aborted trips. For example, she attempts twice to travel to South America with two different boyfriends, first, Miguel, and then Ganders, but both trips are calamitous. The men turn out to be manic or possessive or both, and the relationships dissolve with, on her part, a sense of “precarious relief” (123). On occasions, the breakdowns seem self-inflicted, portraying a pattern of hindering the attachments she forms. An example of this is the sudden cancellation of the planned move to Mexico with her partner John, despite all the prior preparations, including a heartfelt farewell dinner with her mother. In a perplexing act of self-sabotage, she engages in a liaison with another man, triggering a rift with John and the plans are abandoned.
17These breakdowns and aborted road trips in the narrative would suggest that these bumps in the road serve as pivotal moments, revealing the complexities and vulnerabilities within Jan’s life. They unravel the intricate, shifting lines between her personal struggles, failed relationships, and the tumultuous nature of her nomadic existence. They become a reflection of the challenges, even self-sabotage, that shape her journey, leading to a deeper exploration of her own identity and the transformative power of these experiences.
18In her 2015 memoir, My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem gracefully captures the essence of life's journey—a dynamic interplay of momentum, experiences, and the complex reality of living life not in theory, but in practice. Steinem articulates the road as both unpredictable and chaotic yet brimming with profound lessons and transformative moments: “The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts” (Steinem xix). Baby Driver encapsulates the messiness inherent in a life’s journey, fraught with gaps and fissures.
19At the heart of Baby Driver, there exists a profound and gaping fracture: the absence of Jan’s daughter. As we probe the text, it becomes evident that the loss of her child runs as an undercurrent, working its way through the entire work like a fissure manifesting her fragility and grief. The narrative bears witness to this absence, offering a poignant exploration of the complexities of pain and its indelible impact on her life. From the very beginning, the text makes an unexpected overture unveiling a critical event—a pregnancy and birth. Not the narrator’s birth, though, as one would typically expect in an autobiography; but her pregnancy. At the age of 15, Jan experiences the devastating loss of her baby.
20In the opening lines of Baby Driver, Jan paints a vivid and intimate picture of her pregnant body. As she tenderly pats her belly, she shares a comparison between the burgeoning orb of her body and the protective layer of a car bumper: “I patted the turquoise cloth draped over my seven-month belly, feeling the baby move within, revolving now like a restless planet. This hard, compact ball was comforting—a rubber bumper to protect me from the world” (1).
21She finds solace in this analogy, perceiving her growing belly as a sturdy and resilient layer, shielding her from the world’s uncertainties. This insightful description encapsulates the strangeness of pregnancy, when a mother experiences being a host to an enigmatic guest. Within her own body, she carries a being with whom she is simultaneously familiar and utterly unknown—a juxtaposition that evokes the sense of an otherworldly presence, both distant and intimately intertwined. Little wonder that this blissful connection is a source of comfort to Jan, a kind of safeguard from a complicated outside world.
22Considering the evocative bumper analogy, it becomes clear why Jan, the narrator, develops such a profound connection with the cars she inhabits in her adult life. The association between her protective belly and a car bumper instils a deep appreciation for the vehicles with which she associates. Among them, the silver ’55 Cadillac and the green ’54 Chevy hold particular significance. Jan’s descriptions reveal her attachment to these automobiles, seeing them as more than mere machines. The silver Cadillac exudes a sense of grandeur, its presence evoking a feeling of power and freedom that resonates with her nomadic spirit. On the other hand, the green Chevy carries an endearing quality, its innocent expression captured by the front of the car, “the kind with sweet innocent expression on the grill” (202). These cars become extensions of her identity and through her intimate relationship with them, Jan finds a sense of companionship, and a tangible embodiment of the freedom she cherishes.
23This car-refuge analogy confers the opening chapter of Baby Driver a poignant and emotionally charged dimension. The narrative takes a shocking turn as Jan recounts the agony of a premature labour, the numbness of experiencing a stillbirth, and the profound sorrow that accompanies the sight of a “tiny, empty coffin” (8). This heart-shattering experience lays bare the fragility of life, a profound sense of loss, and the grief that follows. In the immediate aftermath, Jan finds the courage to articulate the inexpressible. As the “red blur of pain” (7) subsides, she experiences a peculiar sense of relief, quickly followed by a piercing emptiness as the reality of the stillbirth sets in. Stroking the lifeless baby’s body, engrossed in examining the tiny toes in a “reverent trance” (7), she names the baby Natasha, and for a moment the world around her disintegrates, as if struck by an invisible earthquake. The only sounds she perceives are the mournful melodies of women singing, the crowing of roosters, and the howling of dogs, a “wild menagerie of souls” (8) united in mourning for her lost baby. Furthermore, Jan's depiction of the rain pouring down stands as a powerful detail in the narrative, instilling thoughts of her baby lying in a coffin, now inundated by the drenched earth. The powerful image is key to understanding the turbulent emotions and obsessive journeying that permeate the rest of the narrative.
24The incessant and unpredictable nature of Jan’s journeying on the road can be interpreted as an expression of her grief—an act of defiance against any attempt to confine or restrict her. According to our interpretation of the text, Jan’s nomadic existence can be seen as a symbol of navigating grief, a way to steer through the tumultuous currents of sorrow. Few have written more penetratingly than Toni Morrison about living through grief and how physical expression is crucial to moving through the healing process. As she remarks in her novel Sula, “The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompanies the stupidity of loss” (135). It seems to us that Jan’s compulsion to move and throw herself about, her restlessness and living perilously close to the edge, is likely generated by her grief. Thanks to the twin creative forces of journeying and journaling, we might say, Jan transmutes the unbearable motionlessness of her dead baby into her own constant movement in life as on the page.
- 8 For critical analysis of the interplay between gender, identity, and narrative in women’s autobiogr (...)
25In Baby Driver we gather a growing sense that the act of writing gives form to Jan Kerouac’s frenzied life, a life which carries loss and grief at its heart. Writing an autobiographical novel is, after all, a gesture of writing oneself into the world. As William Spengemann theorized in one of the first academic studies on autobiography, “each author invents a self in the process of writing” (15). The genre of autobiography, as a writing strategy of self-definition, holds particular significance for women whose lives have historically been marginalized and overlooked. The processes of subject formation and agency, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have analysed, is relevant for women’s life writing which, in the light of feminism and cultural critical theory, have revealed women’s autobiography “as a previously unacknowledged mode of making visible formerly invisible subjects.” (Smith and Watson 5).8 This holds true for Jan Kerouac’s Baby Driver, where the act of writing seems to grant her authorial substance. However, as she writes herself into the world, she cannot escape the realization of her own mortality that comes hand in hand with this process. In her introspective exploration of why she writes, Jan Kerouac acknowledges in Trainsong the shifting, even conflicting emotions that drive her. On the one hand, she recognizes the necessity to purge herself of inner turmoil through writing, seeking catharsis and liberation. On the other hand, she is wary of the potential risk of unravelling and disintegrating into a rigid, fossilized version of herself. This duality in her writing process can be seen as a profound vision of both composition and decomposition, where the act of creation is intertwined with the potential for self-destruction:
And why am I writing about these crazy things I did in Peru? Who the hell cares? Maybe I do -- maybe I have to, have to write about it all so it will disperse like blood in the ocean or like ink staining a blotter through my hands and feet my ears my eyes dripping underground to petrify and become stone engravings for people to read because I didn’t bring a camera and no one else can see the Rio Perené and the banana trees and the canoe maybe a painting would be better certainly would be more fun than sitting here like this twisting my spine into driftwood hour after hour maybe I’ll die at the typewriter and they’ll find a skeleton hunched over with metacarpal bones resting on the keys. THE END. (Trainsong 65)
- 9 For Mark Brown, Jack Kerouac’s typewriter became a “compositional instrument.”
26This meditation on the seemingly endless struggle of the writer’s craft reminds us of Joan Didion’s description of the writing imperative, the “fictive imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience” (11). It has the added interest of culminating in an enduring image of being hunched over a typewriter even in death, reminiscent of Jack Kerouac's iconic, fusional relationship with his typewriter.9 Could this be an acknowledgement of her father's literary legacy, using humour to subvert her own narrative and forming her individual voice within the context of his influence?
27The final chapter of Baby Driver holds particular significance for our exploration of shifting lines of descendance and ascendance. It evolves into a contemplation on grief as Jan recounts the moment she heard the announcement of her father’s passing. As the news reaches her through the radio while seated on the bus, a wave of emotions hits Jan. Not only does she find herself grappling with the sorrow that accompanies the loss of such an important and complicated figure in her life, she also relives the grief she carries for her dead daughter, Natasha. The juxtaposition of the mundane bus ride with the weight of this life-altering news exemplifies the unpredictability of vulnerability and how it can strike in the most unexpected moments: “I had felt the sorrow. Just like Natasha, I thought. Both my father and my daughter had been half-formed, then lost. Suddenly there on the bus, I surprised myself with a welling of tears, amid the stuffy bustle of people getting off at Klamath Falls, Oregon” (203).
28The closing chapter of the narrative marks a homecoming for Jan as she travels to her mother’s house in Washington State. Upon her return, mother and daughter share a bedroom, the very essence of intimacy and nostalgia. As the night envelops them in its calmness, Jan feels a sense of reassurance as well as a drifting feeling that comforts her. In this moment, they lie in their beds, their bodies physically close, evoking a profound sense of connection albeit a paradoxical one, containing a feeling of being both anchored and free-floating at the same time: “My mother and I were snuggled in beds perpendicular to each other, feet almost touching… I floated for a while in the flickering darkness” (203). By opening her life story with a stillbirth and closing it with a homecoming to her mother, Jan Kerouac frames the female experience of grieving a still birth. The magnitude of this emotional fracture is rendered even more profound, as it intertwines with the complexities of broken familial ties with her father. Her homecoming, eventually, symbolizes a sense of continuity as she returns to the comforting embrace of her mother and an ensuing sense of floating or lightness of being.
29The conceptual framework of shifting lines reveals stratified complexities within the text, thereby shedding light on the intersecting trajectories of the protagonist’s life and work. Notably, the narrative underscores the painful intertwining of love and loss, ubiquitous to the human condition but which finds a certain resolution in the cathartic act of writing it. Our examination of Baby Driver has unveiled the subterranean presence of maternal disenfranchised grief, a foundational element of the narrative’s trajectory. Combined with the disrupted lineage of the protagonist’s father, this contributes to the nuanced layering of the narrative, to a poetics of dislocation.
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