Hit the Road, Jack

Jack Kerouac: On the Road

The next American classic on this summer’s reading list. Well, read it, been there, done that. The novel had a few moments, but, all in all quite a struggle to get through it.

Kerouac tells the story of four road trips writer Sal Paradise takes between 1947 and 1950. Freshly divorced and recovering from an illness, Sal meets the free-spirited Dean Moriarty, an ex-convict, aspiring writer and man living on the road. Sal then decides to hit the road as well. On a first trip, Sal links up with Dean and other friends in Denver, before heading on for San Francisco. A French friend of his, Remi Boncoeur, gets him a job as a watchman at a camp for sailors. After falling out with Remi, Sal leaves San Francisco and meets a Mexican girl, Terry. Together with Terry and her son he takes up work in the cotton fields. While Sal enjoys the simple life, he finally decides to leave Terry and head back for New York.

The second trip begins in New York and includes, among others Dean Moriarty and his mistress Marylou. From then on, the entire story is increasingly centered around Moriarty. The journey first takes the group to New Orleans where they stay with morphine-addicted Old Bull Lee. The group then heads on to San Francisco and Dean leaves Marylou to be with his wife Camille again. A third trip takes Sal from New York to San Francisco and back again. A fourth trip takes him, Dean Moriarty and others to Mexico, where Moriarty leaves Sal, who has fallen sick with dysentery, behind. The novel finishes with Sal back in New York, finding a girlfriend and meeting both Remi Boncoeur and Dean Moriarty.

The book is widely regarded as a classic and it has its moments. I liked the depiction of the first journey. Here, Kerouac conveys a good impression of the feeling of being on the road, while not spoiling it with Dean Moriarty’s endless monologues (yet). The historical background of the novel is also interesting, as the characters are based on Kerouac and his circle of beat-generation friends. The main character, writer Sal Paradise, is based on Kerouac himself, Neal Cassady is the real-life Dean Moriarty. 

Still, both writing style and content make this novel hard to read. Especially after the first journey, with Dean Moriarty taking a more prominent role, the whole thing becomes a seemingly endless repetition of fast driving, petty crime, parties, girls and senseless psychobabble of characters who are evidently taking too many drugs. The narrative style, a seemingly furious, but also endless enumeration of the characters’ activities, doesn’t help much neither. Moreover, most characters do not come over as very likable, right on the contrary. Dean Moriarty and others instead seem simply like idolized drug wrecks who take themselves way too seriously.
After reading the book, I realized I could just have watched the movie instead... that would have saved me two weeks of struggling with "On the Road".

Random movie reference:

The first association I had with Dean Moriarty... the lizard queen.

Favorite quotes:

“He is the prettiest child I have ever seen. Look at those eyes …I want you par-ti-cu-larly to see the eyes of this little Mexican boy … and notice how he will come to manhood with his own particular soul be-speaking itself through the windows which are his eyes, and such lovely eyes surely do prophesy and indicate the loveliest of souls.” Dean Moriarty. Kind of says it all regarding the book’s dia-/ monologues.

“… the only people for me 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 commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn.”

“I was so lonely, so sad, so tired, so quivering, so broken, so beat, that I got up my courage, the courage necessary to approach a strange girl, and acted.”

“It was always manana. For the next week, that was all I heard, manana, a lovely word and one that probably means heaven.”

“I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.”

“I want to marry a girl. … This can’t go on all the time- all this franticness and jumping around.”

“It was a sullen moment. We were thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care.”