On the Road

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On the Road
On the Road book cover
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On the Road book cover
Author Jack Kerouac
Country United States
Language English
Genre(s) Novel
Beat
Publisher
Released 1957
Media Type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages Approx. 320 pages
ISBN ISBN 0-14-004259-8
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).

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 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 only three weeks in a burst of artistic fury while living with his second wife, Joan Haverty, in an apartment at 454 West Twentieth Street in Manhattan, which he hammered out 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 tiny 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. 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.

Contents

[edit] Plot summary

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Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

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. Due to Sal's fixation with Dean, he may be interpreted as gay or a closet homosexual.

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 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 [him] 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 [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.”

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

[edit] Quotes

  • "I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else's."
-- Bob Dylan
  • "If you're working with words, it's got to be poetry. I grew up with [the books of Jack] Kerouac. If he hadn't wrote On The Road, the Doors would have never existed. Morrison read On The Road down in Florida, and I read it in Chicago. That sense of freedom, spirituality, and intellectuality in On The Road -- that's what I wanted in my own work."
- Ray Manzarek
  • "After 1957 On the Road sold a trillion levis and a million espresso machines, and also sent countless kids on the road...the alienation, the restlessness, the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out the road."
- William Burroughs
  • "That's not writing at all - it's typing."
- Truman Capote, on the story that On the Road was written in three weeks [1]
  • "It was actually OK to write like this! Who knew?"
- Thomas Pynchon (from the introduction to his Slow Learner anthology)

[edit] References in Popular Culture

It has been suggested that this section be split into a new article. (Discuss)

The book itself contains literally hundreds of references to Popular Culture.

  • The New York based alternative band 10,000 Maniacs had a song on their 1987 album "In My Tribe" entitled "Hey Jack Kerouac". The song includes multiple references to both Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg.
  • Kerouac is referred to in the Five Iron Frenzy song "Superpowers" "...sometimes I feel like I'm Holden Caulfield, sometimes Jack Kerouac. I wanted to be famous now I want to take it back..."
  • In Billy Joel's song "We Didn't Start the Fire", he refers to Jack Kerouac, "...Mickey Mantle, Kerouac, Sputnik..."
  • In an episode of the 7th season of the television program "That '70s Show", when asked by his father, Red Forman, if he had slept the whole day, Eric answered that he had been reading Jack Kerouac's classic "On the Road", saying "why get out of bed when you can read about people that get out of bed?"
  • In Steve Earle's song "The Other Kind" he sings "You see it used to be I was really free, I didn't need no gasoline to run. Before you could say Jack Kerouac you'd turn your back and I'd be gone".
  • It's the favorite book of Seth and Marissa in the television program The O.C., but they refer to "the pancake tour of North America" in what may be an error by the writers of the show.
  • In an episode of the television program 3rd Rock from the Sun, now that high school's over for him, Tommy wants to follow Jack Kerouac's lead and hit the road. Later, he actually decides he's ready to go to college, and Harry suggests maybe he can study Kerouac.
  • On the television program Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Xander Harris is shown reading On the Roadin "Choices", announcing his plan that after graduating from high school, he will leave the southern California town of Sunnydale to get out and see America. He got as far as Oxnard before the engine fell out of his car.
  • The Weezer song "Holiday" contains the lyrics "On the road with Kerouac /Sheltered in his Bivouac / On this road we'll never die..."
  • The Our Lady Peace song "All for You" contains the lyrics "Jack Kerouac, K-K-K-Kerouac / On the road and in my head."
  • The Band Spitalfield has a song titled "I Loved The Way She Said L.A.", which is a direct quote from the book.
  • On the television program Freaks and Geeks, Lindsay and her friends read Jack Kerouac's On The Road.
  • The Scottish indie-pop band Jesse Garon And The Desperadoes, had a song in 1986 called 'The Rain Fell Down'. It contains the lines, 'On the road, me and my best friend. Though Jacky Kerouac never meant it like this.'
  • Indie rapper Sage Francis recited: "I'm on the road reading Kerouac / It's poems versus better raps" in his song "Escape Artist".
  • In an episode of the television program Quantum Leap, Sam Beckett leaps into a member of a 1950s biker gang in California. He meets the leader's girlfriend who wants to become a writer, and that On The Road is her inspiration for living. He even learns that Jack Kerouac is at a cabin nearby and visits him, hoping that Kerouac can convince the girl to make the right choices in life.
  • "On the road like Kerouac" is a phrase in the song "On the Move" by Mudvayne.
  • The Beastie Boys mention the novel and author in the song "3-Minute Rule" off of Paul's Boutique: "You slip, you slack, you clock me, you lack/While I'm reading On The Road by my man Jack Kerouac".
  • In the song "All The Madmen" on the 1971 David Bowie album, "The Man Who Sold The World," Bowie sings "'Cause I'd rather stay here/With all the madmen/Than perish with the sadmen roaming free/And I'd rather play here/With all the madmen/For I'm quite content they're all as sane/As me," a clear reference to a line in "On The Road."[citation needed]
  • Eric Kripke, creator of the WB's Supernatural, has said in an interview that he based his characters Sam and Dean Winchester on Sal and Dean. In the show the two Winchester brothers are on an endless road trip through America, hunting ghosts and other supernatural phenomena.
  • The phrase "stranger flowers" in "8:16AM" by 311 (Grassroots, 1994) is a reference to the Jack Kerouac book On the Road.
  • The opening track on King Crimson's 1982 album Beat is "Neal And Jack And Me", referring to Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady. The band also used the title to name a live DVD released in 2004. Beat contains other Kerouac references, and, according to the Trouser Press Record Guide, was inspired by the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of On the Road.
  • In the book, "Bloodsucking Fiends" (1995) by Christopher Moore, the hero, Tommy, a would-be writer in San Francisco, idolizes Kerouac and Ginsberg and is reading "On The Road" for inspiration.
  • The German alternative rock band Sportfreunde Stiller released two tracks on their album "Thontr?ger" entitled "On The Road" and "Unterwegs" ("Unterwegs" as a German translation of "On the road"). The lyrics of "Unterwegs" tell about the singer's search for Jack Kerouac to ask him if it was really true back then, and the singer also questions whether he was perhaps with Sal, Dean, and Mary Lou only in his dreams.
  • In the song "Boxcar" by the Bay-area band Jawbreaker, lead singer Blake Schwarzenbach says, "Like killing cops and reading Kerouac".
  • Jon Foreman, lead singer for the San Diego band Switchfoot, refers to Kerouac and reads a passage from "On the Road" during a live concert on the band's DVD "Live in San Diego."
  • The lyrics in the Styrofoam/Ben Gibbard song "Couches in Alleys," evoke Jack Kerouac: asking for advice based upon "On the Road." Lyrics include "Hey Jack, it's me, I don't mean to bother you but something's been on my mind: that the end of this road that climbs the horizon will be reached in a matter of miles..." and "Oh Jack, you see, I felt like your mirror with the wind whipping through my hair..." Ben Gibbard has also stated that On the Road is one of his favorite books.
  • British band Marillion has a track called "Torch Song" on their album "Clutching at Straws". Its opening lines are "Read some Kerouac and it put me on the track, to burn a little brighter now. Something about Roman candles fizzing out, shine a little light on me now." This echoes Kerouac's imagery at one point in "On the Road."
  • The Hold Steady's third album, Boys and Girls in America, is taken from a quote in Chapter 10 of Part 1. The theme is further extended in the song "Stuck Between Stations" which features the opening line: "There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right / Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together."
  • The song "Stranger Than Fiction" by the punk band Bad Religion contains the line "Caringosity killed the Kerouac cat," acting as a metaphor and also as a reference to the Beatnik's stereotypical use of the word 'cat.'
  • The song "Lost in America" written by Pittsburgh author and singer/songwriter Bill Deasy contains the following line in the first verse "Stoned out on Kerouac, Trying to get it just right."
  • British Singer/Songwriter Richard Thompson references Jack Kerouac in his song "Sibella."
  • Irish band Bell X1 have a quote from Kerouacs 'On The Road' towards the end of their song 'Beautiful Madness'- "and fabulous roman candles explode like spiders across the sky..."
  • The song "Big Dipper," written by David Lowery and appearing on the 1996 Cracker album The Golden Age, has the lyrics "Hey Jim Kerouac, brother of the famous Jack/Or so he likes to say, lucky bastard."

[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 the 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.

[edit] Publication data

  • On The Road, Jack Kerouac, Penguin Books; Reprint edition (January 1, 1991), 307 pages, ISBN 0-14-004259-8

[edit] References

  • 1  Gerald Nicosia, biographer of Kerouac.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links


Books by Jack Kerouac
Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings • Visions of Gerard • Doctor Sax • The Town and the City • Maggie Cassidy • Vanity of Duluoz • On the Road • Visions of Cody • The Subterraneans • Tristessa • The Dharma Bums • Lonesome Traveler • Desolation Angels • Big Sur • Satori in Paris • Pic • Old Angel Midnight • Book of Dreams • Good Blonde & Others • Orpheus Emerged • Book of Sketches • And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (unpublished)
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