Bibliofreakblog

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

I highly recommend not reading this book.  I recommend listening to it on CD in the car.  At least, that’s what I did.  Back in college I used to drive almost every weekend 100 miles down I-94 from Kalamazoo to Ann Arbor to see my fiancé.  If you don’t know, let me explain that there’s not much good radio there.  So, I did what anyone who loves books and is so overwhelmed with liberal arts required reading would do: I checked out books on CD from the library.

Kerouac loosely based his main character, Dean Moriarty, on his friend Neal Cassady.  Kerouac disguises himself as Sal Paradise, and William S. Burroughs as Old Bull Lee.  Many other Beats appear under fictitious names, and some of the names, such as Burroughs as Bull or Will Lee turn up some of Kerouac’s other works.

Neal as Dean became a huge cult idol after the popularization of this book.  Though it was published in 1957, it takes place in the late forties and was written in ‘51.  

A lot of people have heard about it’s origins–that Kerouac wrote in on one long piece of scroll paper, sleeved through his typewriter and that he wrote it on a Benzedrine bender over a three week period.  I was just reading up on this on Wikipedia’s articles on the Beats, Kerouac, and On the Road.  The former two articles confirm this and the latter claims it is not true.  But that’s Wikipedia for you.  Either way, there is such as scroll in existence, and apparently someone associated with football of all things recently bought it for $2.5 mil and it will tour the country this year (I hope by car–can you imagine such a road trip?)

The book starts off with a rambling bang, and doesn’t let up.  Ever.  Kerouac writes:

“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up.  I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.  With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.  Before that I’d often dreamed of going West to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off.  Dean is the perfect guy for the road because he actually was born on the road, when his parents were passing through Salt Lake City in 1926 [this makes him 22ish when the novel starts off], in a jalopy, on their way to Los Angeles.  First reports of him came to me through Chad King, who’d shown me a few letters from him written in a New Mexico reform school.  I was tremendously interested in the letters because they so naïvely and sweetly asked Chard to teach him all about Nietzsche and all the wonderful intellectual things Chad knew.  At one point Carlo [Allen Ginsberg] and I talked about the letters and wondered if we would ever meet the strange Dean Moriarty.  This is all far back, when Dean was not the way he is today, when he was a young jailkid shrouded in mystery.  Then news came that Dean was out of reform school and was coming to New York for the first time; also there was talk that he had just married a girl called Marylou.”

Oh how I wish blogs were invented back then.  Can’t you just see the Beat’s as bloggers, with their worship of spontaneity, no editing, and art mimicking real life?  

The last phrase is important–that he’d just married Marylou.  Basically Dean can never make up his damn mind about what woman he wants to be with.  You know how on Scrubs back in…oh I forget which season, but sometime a while back, back when it was good, where J.D. convinces Eliot to dump her boyfriend and get back together with him, and when she does, the episode ends with J.D. realizing he doesn’t want to be with her?  Yeah, think if there were three Eliots.  That’s how Dean is.  And here’s what he does because of it:

I’d like to add that I totally stole this image from Wikipedia.  I don’t know where they got it, so I’ll at least just give them the credit.

There’s one more thing that I’d like to add that is important to recognize.  Correct me if I’m wrong here, but this is the first journey-focused book where the vessel is an automobile.  Since time immemorial, or at least, whenever Homer wrote the Odyssey, the journey, and it’s route ha been an important feature in literature.  Homer and and Conrad used boats, Twain used a raft.  Chaucer used a caravan of sorts.  But I don’t know of anyone else who used a car.

If you like this book/author, you might like:

On the Road: The Original Scroll (F) by Jack Kerouac
The Grapes of Wrath (F) by John Steinbeck
Naked Lunch (F) by William S. Burroughs
The Savage Detectives (F) by Roberto Bolaño
Go Now (F) by Richard Hell
Jude the Obscure (F) by Thomas Hardy
Heart of Darkness (F) by Joseph Conrad
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (CNF) by Hunter S. Thompson
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (F) by Tom Wolfe
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (CNF) by Robert M. Pirsig
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (F) by James Joyce
Catcher in the Rye (F) by J.D. Salinger
The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (F) by Oscar Hijuelos
Blue Highways: A Journey into America (CNF) by William Least Heat-Moon
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (F) by Mark Twain
Tropic of Cancer (F) by Henry Miller
The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (CNF) by Aldous Huxley
The Archaic Revival (CNF) by Terrance McKenna
Go (F) by John Clellon Holmes
Howl & Other Poems (P) by Allen Ginsberg
A Coney Island of the Mind (P) by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Approximate Man & Other Writings (P) by Tristan Tzara
Kerouac: A Biography (NF) by Ann Charters 
Off the Road (CNF) by Carolyn Cassady 

Other works by Jack Kerouac*:

On the Road: The Original Scroll (F)
Dharma Bums (F)
Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha (F)
The Subterraneans (F) 
Big Sur (F)
Visions of Cody (F)
Desolation Angels (F)
Lonesome Traveler (F)
Maggie Cassidy (F)
Tristessa (F)
Book of Sketches (CNF)
Book of Haikus (P)
Kerouac: Selected Letters (VOL I-II) (CNF)
Scattered Poems (P)
The Portable Jack Kerouac (F/P/CNF)
Town and the City (F)
Mexico City Blues (P)
Orpheus Emerged (F)
Book of Blues (P)
Dr. Sax (F)
Visions of Gerard (F)
Pomes All Sizes (P)
Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac 1947-1954 (CNF)
The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (P)
Vanity of Duluoz (F)
Good Blonde (P)
Book of Dreams (F)
Atop an Underworld (F)
Beat Generation (D)
Satori in Paris (F)
Pic (F)
Old Angel Midnight (P)
Heaven and Other Poems (P)

With Albert Saijo and Lew Welch:

Trip Trap (CNF)

With Paul Maher, Jr.:

Empty Phantoms: Encounters and Interviews with Jack Kerouac (CNF)
 

With William S. Burroughs:

And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (F) 

*NOTE: This list is not exhaustive.  For the most part in only contains works still in print, though you can still find many of his other works used.

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