Alice came to a fork in the road. "Which road do I take?" she asked.
"Where do you want to go?" responded the Cheshire cat.
"I don't know," Alice answered.
"Then," said the cat, "it doesn't matter."
---Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland---
The best books are the ones who re-invent your desire to live and give you a certain direction to take or a mad suggestion that throws you into the abyss of complete waywardness. For what is life and earth but a giant collection of dust and bones? Only if you can dive in this wonderland of all plurality with every mad instinct and every animal desire you have can you find a meaning. Jack Kerouac’s On the road attempts to do just that.
Hemingway summed up the Lost Generation in The Sun also rises, observing the cynical disdain of an entire literary collective after their views were eclipsed by the World Wars. What came next was the Beat Generation with its nuances of being ‘down and out’ and simply ‘tired’. However, Kerouac’s triumphant novel is widely regarded as the Bible of the Beat Generation because it refused to go down with the tired eyes of time when there was so much history yet to be made. It gave a suggestion, a whisper that you could always be down but never out. It’s for this simple reason that even now, in 2006, the book finds for itself the prying eyes of readers of all ages and generations and cravings.
The largely autobiographical and part fictionalized memoir tells the story of Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s alter-ego), a writer, and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), his pal and the muse of his travel prose. Together they go to look for America and not just the American Dream; the America that lay before them to leap into and assault with the senses they possessed. This travelogue is more than mere descriptions of hitchhiking around the country and getting by on friendships, drugs and booze. It is a howl of faith and of unseen expectations and the ears that hear this howl. Dean and Sal are vignettes in the play of the American Dream and what the term has come to mean generations later.
In Sal’s controlled and civic vision, Dean immediately held a special leadership because at first introduction, he was full of zeal and the mad passion for life. Dean had spent time in prison and this time gave him a purpose of purposelessness in moving through life. He’s been looking for his wino father for quite some time but without luck. Dean was a ‘holy con-man’ but one contained with a streak of random lightning that saw the pair quickly take to the road and everything it entailed. After a lot of time through the roads of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver and several other towns spent hitchhiking, boozing and having sex with strangers, their desires are soaked up by economical thirst and they have to part from time to time. Dean gets married and has certain responsibilities to take care of and Sal is still as lost as he was before taking the road.
Hemingway summed up the Lost Generation in The Sun also rises, observing the cynical disdain of an entire literary collective after their views were eclipsed by the World Wars. What came next was the Beat Generation with its nuances of being ‘down and out’ and simply ‘tired’. However, Kerouac’s triumphant novel is widely regarded as the Bible of the Beat Generation because it refused to go down with the tired eyes of time when there was so much history yet to be made. It gave a suggestion, a whisper that you could always be down but never out. It’s for this simple reason that even now, in 2006, the book finds for itself the prying eyes of readers of all ages and generations and cravings.
The largely autobiographical and part fictionalized memoir tells the story of Sal Paradise (Kerouac’s alter-ego), a writer, and Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), his pal and the muse of his travel prose. Together they go to look for America and not just the American Dream; the America that lay before them to leap into and assault with the senses they possessed. This travelogue is more than mere descriptions of hitchhiking around the country and getting by on friendships, drugs and booze. It is a howl of faith and of unseen expectations and the ears that hear this howl. Dean and Sal are vignettes in the play of the American Dream and what the term has come to mean generations later.
In Sal’s controlled and civic vision, Dean immediately held a special leadership because at first introduction, he was full of zeal and the mad passion for life. Dean had spent time in prison and this time gave him a purpose of purposelessness in moving through life. He’s been looking for his wino father for quite some time but without luck. Dean was a ‘holy con-man’ but one contained with a streak of random lightning that saw the pair quickly take to the road and everything it entailed. After a lot of time through the roads of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Denver and several other towns spent hitchhiking, boozing and having sex with strangers, their desires are soaked up by economical thirst and they have to part from time to time. Dean gets married and has certain responsibilities to take care of and Sal is still as lost as he was before taking the road.
In Sal’s view, Dean’s holiness soon depreciates as distance makes bitter hearts and Dean’s previous outlook of life is changed just like everyone else’s. His hues of an epical hero collapse and he is looked by the narrator himself as a ‘Holy Goof’ and a ‘Beat’; whereas at the start of the saga, he was holy and upbeat. Nevertheless, Sal agrees to take on the road once again with Dean and an acquaintance and the three of them drive down to Mexico. The near climax scene is the swan song of the pair as they discover that the road still has everything they loved about it from the start and perhaps will continue to do so till the end of time. We get a sense that their earlier cynical retort at the road was just a summary of their personal disappointments and failures. Here, on the Mexican border, there is a beautiful marijuana-fused introduction of their time spent with some local Mexicans smoking grass and visiting a Bordello submitting young prostitutes, drinks and Mambo music. Soon, they get out of there and drive up to Mexico City where Dean betrays Sal and leaves him behind to get back to his family.
The end of the novel comes a year later when Dean visits Sal and his girlfriend to come with him to San Francisco but due to unfavourable conditions, the offer is rejected and he has to travel back to West alone. Sal closes this journal of both their lives by sitting on a pier at a sunset looking to the West of America, reminiscing on God, America, and the time spent on the road. He confesses that ‘everyday I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found. I think of Dean Moriarty.’
This sum up of Sal Paradise’s never attained Paradise is what makes this work one of the most realistic yet dismal endings in modern literature. I guess, to me, the message here was that you can travel everywhere you want and do whatever pleases you but the problem will always be that when one reaches a certain zenith or a perfect moment, one wouldn’t know what to do for the encore save reflecting back on the former days of glory, reflect on what you were before this moment and what you now, after it. There is a haunting resemblance in this ending to The Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield says, ‘Never tell anyone anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.’
What makes this piece a work of more interest is the fact that all the events in the book are largely said to be true. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady really did hitchhike around America for more than seven years, at the end of which, as the story goes, Kerouac sat down with a creative fury and wrote down the whole of On the Road in only three weeks on a single roll of teletype paper. The teletype paper does exist and was auctioned for $2.4 million dollars. However, the timeline is still disputable. What is important though is not the novel’s process but the end result.
The book went to change the lives of many and will in the years to come because as long as the reader is as ‘mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time’ and ‘burn, burn, burn’ like the Dean Moriartys of the world…then the road will always provide an answer. For, even on the road to hell, the flowers can make you smile.
The end of the novel comes a year later when Dean visits Sal and his girlfriend to come with him to San Francisco but due to unfavourable conditions, the offer is rejected and he has to travel back to West alone. Sal closes this journal of both their lives by sitting on a pier at a sunset looking to the West of America, reminiscing on God, America, and the time spent on the road. He confesses that ‘everyday I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found. I think of Dean Moriarty.’
This sum up of Sal Paradise’s never attained Paradise is what makes this work one of the most realistic yet dismal endings in modern literature. I guess, to me, the message here was that you can travel everywhere you want and do whatever pleases you but the problem will always be that when one reaches a certain zenith or a perfect moment, one wouldn’t know what to do for the encore save reflecting back on the former days of glory, reflect on what you were before this moment and what you now, after it. There is a haunting resemblance in this ending to The Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield says, ‘Never tell anyone anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.’
What makes this piece a work of more interest is the fact that all the events in the book are largely said to be true. Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady really did hitchhike around America for more than seven years, at the end of which, as the story goes, Kerouac sat down with a creative fury and wrote down the whole of On the Road in only three weeks on a single roll of teletype paper. The teletype paper does exist and was auctioned for $2.4 million dollars. However, the timeline is still disputable. What is important though is not the novel’s process but the end result.
The book went to change the lives of many and will in the years to come because as long as the reader is as ‘mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time’ and ‘burn, burn, burn’ like the Dean Moriartys of the world…then the road will always provide an answer. For, even on the road to hell, the flowers can make you smile.
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