Dean Moriarty, the Mythical Hero in Jack Kerouac's On the Road

My thesis analyses Dean Moriarty, the protagonist of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road and gathers evidence which proves that he is a hero in the mythical sense. As a background to this I inspect various theories on mythology and the mythical hero in general. My intention is to present that Dean embodies the characteristic features of both the traditional American hero and the exceptional man on his road tomaturity and enlightenment. I conceive that it is through Kerouac's idealisation that he becomes the master, the icon of the 1950s and 1960s, and the incarnation of road mythology.