Books - On the Road

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	Books - On the Road

On the Road is a novel by Jack Kerouac, 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 the defining work of the postwar Beat Generation that was so affected by jazz, poetry, and drugs 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 only three weeks in a burst of artistic fury, hammered out on one long scroll of teletype paper, which Kerouac called "the roll". 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 tiny dimestore 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.

In January 2004, the roll began a 13-stop, four-year national tour of museums and libraries, starting at the Orange County History Centre in Orlando, Florida. In January through March 2006 it is on display at the San Francisco Public Library with the first 30 feet unrolled. It will end with a three-month stay at the New York Public Library in 2007.

As of 2005, 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 in 2006.

The story

Michael McClure, a poet in San Francisco who was involved with the Beats said that

:"the world that 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. 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. The narrator tells us in the opening paragraph that "with the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of life you could call 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 , and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx”. Sal remarks that it was in their meeting that “everything that was to come began then”. 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 are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live” and so on.

Sal describes Dean’s criminal tendencies as “a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy…something new, long prophesied, long a-coming”. 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 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”.

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Books - On the Road

The story

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