Written on a scroll, in the span of three weeks, Kerouac’s perhaps most well-renowned piece is a journey not only through America, but the human mind. It does the latter with little pretence and displays basic human emotions with a down to earth touch I believe many would like to possess themselves.
Spontaneously travelling all around America, and also delving into Mexico, visiting anything from San Fransisco and New York City to a nook on the way to Abilene, Texas, the novel, Dean Moriarty, Sal Paradise; they all add up to a wonderful combination of hedonistic pursuit and a satisfaction with very little; yet very much. As they and their varying peers travel anywhere and everywhere they seek not material luxury, instead they are pleased with the luxury of life; being alive and all the experiences that simple fact entails.
Of course the 300 and something pages weren’t actually written in three weeks. The information Kerouac had gathered throughout years of travelling, the notes he had taken and so forth, were compiled in three weeks; this by no means belittling the feat itself. It is just worth to notice that writing some 300 arguably well written pages in only three weeks, just as they came along in one’s mind, would be too much to swallow for even the supernatural.
Without a doubt, On the Road has had a large cultural impact. With this book and many others by Kerouac’s contemporaries, the Beat generation became manifested, and a culture that would grow and reach even into our time was born. On the Road is said to be particularly constitutional for this generation, which is quite apparent throughout the reading; not only from the frequent actual use of the word beat as an adjective or anything else, really, but the entire atmosphere created by Kerouac’s stream of consciousness way of writing, consistent from start to end. (A little note from me here: I usually mark at least some places in the book which I when reading found especially interesting/good/whatever. Upon picking up On the Road however, there are no such marks, which I think you can safely take as a sign of just how captivating the writing is).
I would normally include some examples of sentences and such, to complete the portrait of the book I indeed am trying to accomplish; however: The very last paragraph of the book will prove more than enough to show exactly how entrancing Kerouac’s writing can be; and there is no need to explain further, the text does it all:
“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”
When a book ends like this it’s hard to stop thinking. This end leaves the reader with such a vast expanse of possible thoughts that one doesn’t even have time to think them all. Where is Dean? What’s going to become of Sal?
Kerouac’s book is perhaps the hardest book to describe that I have attempted to do so with. He has written so grippingly about the small pleasures in life; how they can be the largest pleasure, he has written about how money is nothing, how money has no value if one sees the value in everything; then money becomes just what it is; paper and metal.
Feelings are conveyed similarly. The sadness Sal feels at times is so genuine it has no problems in leaping out of the pages and engulfing the reader; and the same goes for happiness; I found myself going ecstatic when they were the same, even though their party was more than 50 years ago, the latter which just shows how valid On the Road is today, was then and will always be.
Sadly there is so much to say about On the Road that just cannot be said here. Much of what could be said lies in reading the novel; devouring it page for page and acquiring that feeling of sitting on the bonnet of the car they are racing across the Nebraskan plains. More of what there is to say lies in reading it again, and again, and again. Personally I have only read it once; through writing this however I can’t wait to read it again.
Conclusively taking into view that On the Road is semi-autobiographical, I must say, Kerouac is a great source of inspiration, even today. If I were to invite one person over for dinner, it would be Kerouac. His values, his On the Road, his whole philosophy, if one is permitted to call it that, is mildly put, astounding. On the Road is definitely a must read of American writing.
