On The Road represents both nonconformity and conformity in terms of Jack Kerouac’s attitude toward American society. The novel shows a group of characters who explicitly refuse to conform to mainstream social norms. They reject middle-class and working-class conventions of hard work and respectability. Rather than committing to a job and aspiring to such things as marriage and a home, Sal and his friends endlessly search for gratuitous personal fulfillment. They have multiple sex partners and travel frequently. The postwar counterculture and Beat movement are represented through such things as their passion for jazz.

In some respects, the novel fits well within American philosophical and literary traditions, many of which had been established a century earlier. Primary among these traditions are Romanticism and Transcendentalism. Rejecting social conventions, including marriage, was a central tenet of Romanticism. The idea of an open, boundless frontier was associated with Westward expansion and manifest destiny. The first part of the novel chronicles their adventures in the west. Henry David Thoreau famously eschewed material comfort, and in his essay on “Self-Reliance,” Ralph Waldo Emerson emphatically pronounced: “whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” In its emphasis on male heroes searching for their true selves, the novel also shows the influence of Walt Whitman in such poems as “Song of Myself.”