Abstract
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is among the seminal texts of the Beat Generation canon, and the author himself is renowned as a hero of American letters and freedom. Kerouac’s book is clearly one of the most inspirational of the last century and helped to spur the culture of mobility, spiritual yearning and adventure in the decades following its release not only in the USA but in many other parts of the world. A close reading of On the Road reveals other realities about the author, through his character Sal Paradise, and the America he discovers in his travels. This article looks at the files from Kerouac’s aborted stay in the US navy, letters, journal entries and the text of On the Road itself to demonstrate that the author’s Whitmanesque longings and ennui are very much rooted in a romantic vision challenged by the realities of mid-20th-century American life. However, Kerouac’s “ecotopia of the West” also suggests other ways of living which would influence America’s counterculture and environmental movements.
Highlights
On the Road is a seminal text of the Beat Generation, part of the early foundational legends of the movement along with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch
The fact that Kerouac wrote about friends who became famous cultural figures is something of a miracle, in keeping with the novel’s hagiographic tone in respect to Neal Cassady and its outsized influence on the young people who have read it around the world for more than 60 years
Kerouac was an old-fashioned urban bohemian who held more in common with Baudelaire and Poe than Emerson and Thoreau. This stance towards life put him at odds with the work/consume paradigm underpinning American society making him at once a kind of subversive and friend of nature that could appeal to a broad swath of philosophies
Summary
On the Road is a seminal text of the Beat Generation, part of the early foundational legends of the movement along with Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. Kerouac was 35 when On the Road first found its way into the bookshops, hands of reviewers and readers He was on the cusp of a decline which led to his death 12 years later as a bitter drunk living with his mother in Florida. On the Road has been seen as a Whitmanesque love letter to America and certainly the book features some of this sentiment These are the parts of the novel which have come in for criticism. The reflexive Kerouac understood his inconsistencies, the quiet scribe and the macho action man, the successful synthesis of which was personified in the shining intellect and wild adventures of On the Road’s hero, Dean Moriarty It was the inconsistencies of America which the author found hardest to reconcile. The naiveite, romanticism and disappointments of Sal Paradise are mirrored in letters, journal entries and the experiences of the author in his short-lived stint in the US navy
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