On the Road
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 On the Road book cover |
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| Author | Jack Kerouac |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel Beat |
| Publisher | Viking Press |
| Released | September 5, 1957 |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 320 pages |
| ISBN | NA |
| Preceded by | The Town and the City (1950) |
| Followed by | The Subterraneans (1958) |
- This article is about the novel On the Road. For the George Carlin comedy album of the same name, see On the Road (album). For the record label, see On The Road Records.
On the Road is a novel by Jack Kerouac, written in April 1951, and published by Viking Press in 1957. This largely autobiographical work, written as a stream of consciousness and based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America, is often considered a defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was inspired by jazz, poetry, and drug experiences. As the inspiration came from real life, hundreds of references in On the Road have real-world counterparts.
The book became an overnight success, and gathered an epic mythos that was worthy of its fame. As the story goes, On the Road was written by Kerouac in three weeks while living with his second wife, Joan Haverty, in an apartment at 454 West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, which he typed on one long scroll of teletype paper, which Kerouac called "the roll."[1] The roll does exist — it was purchased in 2001 by Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts, for $2.4 million — and it was indeed typed in a blazing three weeks, with no margins, singlespaced, and no paragraph breaks. But the myth of the story overlooks some of the finer points of the novel's composition. Much of the book was actually written as it happened, over the seven years of Kerouac's travels, in the small notebooks that he always carried with him and wrote in during his spare time. The myth also overlooks the tedious organization and preparation that came before Kerouac's creative explosion, as well as the fact that Kerouac revised the novel several times before Malcolm Cowley of Viking Press agreed to publish it.
Owing to Irsay's ownership of the scroll, it was on display in sections at Indiana University's Lilly Library in mid-2003. In January 2004, the roll began a 13-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries, starting at the Orange County History Center in Orlando, Florida. From January through March 2006 it was on display at the San Francisco Public Library with the first 30 feet unrolled. It will spend three months on display at the New York Public Library in 2007, and in the spring of 2008 will be on view at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
As of 2006, the book is to be the subject of a forthcoming film, also titled On the Road. Walter Salles is signed to direct, and casting is scheduled to begin later in the year.
Viking Press hopes to publish an uncensored version of the book, containing elements that were deemed unsuitable when it was first published, by the end of 2007, the 50th anniversary of its original publication. Also, Viking plans to fulfill Kerouac's unrealized desire to "...reinsert my pantheon of uniform names..." or in other words exchange the pseudonyms used for the characters throughout the book for those used in the rest of Kerouac's semiautobiographical novels (known collectively as the Duluoz Legend), thus the opening sentence, "I first met Dean Moriarty..." would be changed to "I first met Cody Pomeray..." as the character based on Neil Cassady is called in other works by the author.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
Michael McClure, a poet in San Francisco who was involved with the Beats said that "the world that [they] trembling stepped out into in that decade was a bitter, gray one." In his article "Scratching the Beat Surface," he describes the time as "locked in the Cold War and the first Asian debacle," in "the gray, chill, militaristic silence...the intellective void...the spiritual drabness."
This is the world in which Kerouac takes his journeys that become the material for On the Road. Salvadore (a.k.a. Sal) Paradise, the narrator of On the Road and the character identified as Kerouac's alter ego, is a literate keeper of American culture. We become intimately aware of an elusive narrator, but fixated upon the epic hero of the novel, Dean Moriarty (a pseudonym for Neal Cassady, who was also a part of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters). The narrator tells us in the opening paragraph that "with the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of [his] life you could call [his] life on the road." Dean is the instigator and the inspiration for the journey that Sal will make, the journey that he will record.
The characters are introduced to us in brief vignettes, in a way reminiscent of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; New York City is the starting point, and Sal wants us to understand the people we will be dealing with. The arrival of Dean is the catalyst; Sal describes him as “simply a youth tremendously excited with life.” He also sees “a kind of holy lightning...flashing from his excitement and his visions." When Dean meets Carlo Marx (a pseudonym for Allen Ginsberg), Sal’s closest friend in the city, Sal tells us that a “tremendous thing happened," and that the meeting of Dean and Carlo was a meeting between “the holy con-man with the shining mind [Dean], and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx." Sal remarks that “everything that was to come began then”, in their meeting. Carlo tells Dean about the friends around the country, their experiences, and Sal is telling us that he is following them “because the only people for [him] are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a common place thing, but burn burn burn...”
Sal describes Dean’s criminal tendencies as “a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy...something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides).” The early descriptions of Dean establish a religious motif; people and their personalities are regularly referred to as holy or prophesied. Dean is “a western kinsman of the sun”, and this pagan comparison is yet another supernatural moment in the description of Dean Moriarty. Sal introduces him as the savior of his generation; Sal says that “all [of his] New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired...reasons, but Dean just raced in society, eager for bread and love.”
Sal’s journey continues with his arrival in Chicago. He dates the narrative at 1947, marking it as a specific era in jazz history, “somewhere between its Charlie Parker Ornithology period and another period that began with Miles Davis,” and it inspires Sal to think of his friends “from one end of the country to the other…doing something so frantic and rushing about.” Sal doesn’t say what they are frantically doing, and this is the premise of the narrative. Sal is hardly immune from this. After napping in Des Moines, he wakes up, “and that was the one distinct time in [his] life...when [he] didn’t know who [he] was.”
In San Francisco, Sal confronts social expectations. He takes a job as a night watchman at a boarding camp for merchant sailors waiting for their ship. When he finds the work distasteful, he tells his supervisor that he “wasn’t cut out to be a cop.” In response, Sal is reminded that “it’s [his] duty.... [He] can’t compromise with things like this.” Sal’s aversion to commitment and duty ensure that he does not hold this job for long, and he is soon on the road again, where he meets one of his biggest temptations.
Her name is Terry, and he meets her on the bus to LA. She is a Mexican who has run away from her husband. They spend “the next fifteen days…together for better or for worse.” Sal spends the better part of a week with Terry and her family in a migrant worker’s camp. The agrarian lifestyle initially appeals to Sal, and he says that he “thought [he] had found [his] life’s work.” The economic reality sets in and Sal begins to pray “to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people [he] loved.”
The next significant character that Sal meets is the “Ghost of the Susquehanna”. His role “is to complete the triad” (Goldstein) of symbolic structure in the narrative.
Sal’s continued journey on the road is entwined with the making of Dean as the epic hero: Dean Moriarty, the “son of a wino”. Dean has spent time in prison, for stealing cars. Sal discusses what effect this experience had on Dean saying, “only a guy who’s spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes.... Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.” Dean’s imprisonment, according to Sal, is when his heroic personality was solidified. Prison had the effect of fueling his obsession with the road. What makes him heroic to Sal is his free nature, and his reluctance to tie his spirit to social demands. This self-centered personality causes Dean to “[antagonize] people away from him by degrees.” The institution of marriage is particularly difficult for Dean, and by the end of the novel he is “three times married, twice divorced, and living with his second wife.” This decline of Dean makes up the second part of the novel, and culminates in the end of Sal’s journeys.
Sal’s travels erode into disappointment. He slowly becomes more dissatisfied with what he finds on the road, and he begins to look back on his previous travels in a more cynical way. His companions begin to be people from lower classes, old Negroes and Mexican whores. Back in Denver, and very alone, he speaks in verse saying, “Down in Denver, down in Denver/All I did was die.” We begin to confront the possibility that this journey and Sal’s hero Dean were both failures.
After reuniting with Dean, Sal begins to sense Dean’s decline and labels him “the HOLY GOOF”, when earlier he was called holy in a reverent tone. Dean’s abilities falter. When confronted with his abandonment of wife and child, he is silent. Sal explains, “where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent.... He was BEAT.”
Sal’s last attempt at finding an answer to his problems is a trip through the Mexican countryside to Mexico City with Dean and a hanger-on picked up in Denver. The travelers perk up as soon as they hit the Mexican border, and some of the novel's more memorable scenes depict their marijuana-fused introduction to Mexican culture, including a vivid (but expensive) sojurn to a bordello offering mambo music and underage prostitutes. (Indeed, throughout the book, both Sal and Dean betray a robust attraction to extremely young girls.)
Upon arriving in Mexico City, he immediately develops dysentery, and the final betrayal occurs when Dean leaves him behind, feverish and hallucinating. Sal reflects that “when I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.”
The novel ends a year later in New York. Dean comes back to New York to see Sal and arrange for Sal and his girlfriend to migrate to San Francisco with him. The arrangements to move fall through and Dean returns to the West alone.
Sal closes the novel sitting on a pier during sunset, looking west. He reminisces on God, America, crying children, and the idea that "nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old," and ends with “I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."
[edit] Film adaptation
- Main article: On the Road (film)
A film adaptation of On the Road has been in the works for years, though production has not yet started. Russell Banks wrote a screenplay for producer Francis Ford Coppola. The Brazilian director Walter Salles is now heading the project. After seeing Salles's Motorcycle Diaries Coppola decided on Salles and the pre-production is already in discussion. It is not known if any of Banks's screenplay will be used.
[edit] References
- 1 Gerald Nicosia, biographer of Kerouac.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Jack Kerouac characters, Real names and their aliases, alphabetically
- The Beat Museum in San Francisco
- A gallery of On the Road book covers
- Denver Beat Photo Tour
- Photos of the Kerouac Gas Station in Longmont, CO
- Photos, Neal Cassady Sr. Gravesite
- Photos, Jack Kerouac's Last House, St. Petersburg, FL
- Google Earth tour of sites visited in "On the Road"
| Books by Jack Kerouac |
| The Town and the City • On the Road • The Subterraneans • The Dharma Bums • Doctor Sax • Maggie Cassidy • Mexico City Blues • Book of Dreams • Tristessa • Visions of Cody • Lonesome Traveler • Big Sur • Visions of Gerard • Desolation Angels • Satori in Paris • Vanity of Duluoz • Pic • Scattered Poems • Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings • Old Angel Midnight • Good Blonde & Others • Orpheus Emerged • Book of Sketches • And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (unpublished) |
