On The Road by Jack Kerouac

I found this little treasure again on the community bookshelf at the university. I am typically drawn to read the classics and especially love learning about history through fictional stories. On The Road by Jack Kerouac depicts the misadventures of Sal Paradise at the height of the American beat movement in the late 1940s. Sal is a fairly young man who restlessly traverses the nation from New York to San Francisco and back in search of good times. Kerouac consistently uses words like "dig", "jazz", and "kicks" to fully immerse the reader in the sentiment of the time. Ultimately Sal sticks close to his friend, Dean Moriarty, who embodies the frenzy and trance-like state of mind these cats are always hoping to achieve. The height of their adventures leads on a road trip to Mexico City where Dean hopes to get a quick divorce from his second wife in order to marry a third. Spoiler alert~ Sal and Dean live large spending all their money on beer, weed, and prostitutes while digging some loud Mambo music. Then Sal gets dysentery and decides to go back to New York once he's better and settle down.

For me, I love the idea of this book, but in truth it was a huge disappointment. Sal has returned from fighting in Europe (WWII) and doesn't seem to have any direction. With all his energy and time, he lives to experience life. The problem is that he never really invests in others or settles any where long enough to have a meaningful experience. If anything, I get the feeling he's a mooch or burden to anyone with whom he comes in contact. His poor aunt sends him money anytime he finds himself in a bind. At times it frustrated me to see how irresponsible and self-involved all the main characters are. How disingenuous to portray transcendentalism and authentic vitality through men who have no roots, bail in a jam, steal, get high, sleep around, and seek to be satisfied through external sensations. All in all, I found it terribly boorish.

I will say that Kerouac has some lovely writing skills, but really there are only glimmers in this tale. He can string a couple of good sentences together, but it can't hold a paragraph with sorry content afloat. For instance, in one of Dean's rants, he says, "...Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his bellybottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing. He has to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it's not the tune that counts but IT." And no, that's not IT~ information technology, but a certain intangible "it". To me, this gives any potential readers and insight into what the beat generation was all about. It's complex, skims real human emotion, and is particularly nonsensical. In a moment of real clarity, Sal admits, "I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion." This could summarize the whole book. As you may guess, I'd only recommend it to someone who really feels the need to read all American "classics". Otherwise, just watch a stoner movie and imagine that it's taking place in 1947. It will save you time.