If nothing else, an interesting read because of its madness. It travels geographically and aesthetically through American roads and landscapes. At times it reads like dry travelogue journalism, at other times it reads like mad catholic poetry, and sometimes, like it tends to be marketed, like a hip jazz-beat youth novel.
I was surprised by how much I was moved by the ending, because despite glimpses of genius, it frequently frustrated and bored me. It sealed itself in my mind as a flawed, yet tragic and meaningful novel.

What better time to read Jack Kerouac's timeless classic On the Road than during a pandemic when all my travel plans are on hold indefinitely. This is a delightful book written about Kerouac's travels, primarily with his friend Dean Moriarty, but with many other friends and acquaintances along the way as they traversed America at least twice and Mexico as well from New York to New Jersey to Denver to San Francisco to New Orleans to Houston to Tucson in their search for freedom and individuality. The prose was descriptive and captivating integrating regional music including jazz from the Mississippi Delta to New Orleans to Kansas City as well as local foods into the narrative. This is a story of young people of the Beat Generation trying to find themselves and their way in the world post World War II and during the presidency of Harry Truman. I enjoyed Kerouac's writing. This may have been the perfect time to read this as I was able to vicariously travel throughout America.

I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why it happened right there and then, that I went outside. And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great snowy tops of the Rocky Mountains. I took a deep breath. I had to get to Denver at once."

"It was a wonderful night. Central City is two miles high; at first you get drunk on the altitude, then you get tired, and there's a fever in your soul. We approached the lights around the opera house down the dark narrow street; then we took a sharp right and hit some old saloons with swinging doors. Most of the tourists were in the opera."

"It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time."

n  n    “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”n  n

I am not really into classics.
I always preferred the fantasy genre, due to an innate escapism, a vivid imagination and a constant longing for magic. But as you may tell, I didn't cast spells while reading On the Road. I didn't climb the dark wizard's tower, nor heard prophecies whispered in the dark. I set my sword aside for a while, and hushed my heart's desire to experience passionate romances. After a dear friend's raving about Jack Kerouac, I succumbed to peer pressure. And I am rather glad that I did.

n  n    “I was surprised, as always, by how easy the act of leaving was, and how good it felt. The world was suddenly rich with possibility.” n  n

If you must know one thing about On the Road, is that it doesn't stand out because of its mind-blowing plot. In fact, it is not a plot-driven novel at all. You follow Jack Kerouac's travels throughout America and Mexico, and that's it. What captivates you is his writing style, a writing style the likes of which I had never encountered. You'll notice a plethora of contradictions: it can be lyrical and so beautiful it makes you hold your breath, and want to absorb every detail, every smell and sound and feeling, and then you'll come across so many traces of oral speech, that you're certain you're listening to a conversation full of curse words and half-finished sentences right next to you; you can sense Kerouac's admiration towards his country and at the same time his bitterness and disappointment; you can feel his loneliness to your marrow, and then the camaraderie that keeps him going. You will find your lips curling into a smile, but then a heaviness will settle on your chest, a near sadness because you see those people searching for something, anything, and when they find it, it slips from their fingers. You contemplate your own morality and mortality, question the meaning of ideals when life is too short and full of misery. When the road lies ahead full of possibilities, and you're lost and bound and torn.

n  n    “Because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars...” n  n

When you read On the Road, at first you're a little judgmental towards the characters. But as the story progresses, you are envious of their carelessness, their crazy and wild abandon, their desire to live even when they don't know what they live for. You don't read it for the plot, but you read it for its moments, its vigorous, bright and mesmerising moments, mornings eating apple-pie with ice-cream, dirty streets in an alcohol frenzy, a young man on the top of a mountain with the world at his feet, a mexican brothel shaking by the sounds of mambo, cold nights drinking scotch under a crystal clear sky. In the end, it all comes to one thing: we are the sum of the people we meet. Some of them are destined to change us, draw us to them like moths to the flame. Other pass by like fleeting stars, or constitute a constant and reassuring presence. But all of them, without exception, are pieces of the puzzle of our existence.

n  n    “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 like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” n  n

And this is On the Road.

On The Road...again. This is my second read through of Kerouac’s classic. First time through I was mid twenties and on the road myself. That was thirty years ago. My experience this time was radically different, but just as striking.

What remained constant was Kerouac's prose. While it has long been fashionable to disrespect Kerouac's writing ability and style, I find his prose powerful, full of amazing imagery and surprisingly erudite allusions. This second time through I listened to it on Blackstone Audiobook, read by Tom Parker. Listening, it struck me that Kerouac wrote as Bebop jazz musicians played. On The Road is prose Bebop. Not everyone appreciates jazz, but if you dig Charlie Parker, you've gotta love these Kerouac riffs.

It was my reaction to the story itself that radically changed. Thirty years ago I read it as the story of cool, disaffected young men searching for freedom from a stifling American culture. But three decades later, having out lived both Kerouac and his muse Cassady, knowing how they died, knowing what happened to their children, more fully appreciating the perspective of the women they left over and over again, I read it differently. This time I read it as a tragedy of sad, lost and lonely young men, racing about, running from demons and adulthood, and breaking the lives of others while never coming close to catching that allusive freedom that they sought. It was in there all along - the sadness, loneliness, and brokenness - I just didn't highlight it my first time through.

This reading I especially noted the recurring theme of searching for Dean's derelict, missing father, never found. The longing for some connection with even this, the most pathetic of drunken father figures, stood out to me as a key to the entire novel, and was made doubly tragic as Dean continued to sow and abandon children all along the American road himself.

Both my original reading and my take this time through are in the book, but what I gleaned from it this time was far sadder and far more powerful than the simple tale of cool cats on the road. On The Road is where Bebop meets the Blues.

2nd read, July 2020

Re-reading this I was far more conscious of a growing sense of disillusion in Sal Paradise as he contemplates Dean Moriarty, the epitome of beat: part holy-man, part con-man, the other side of his free-living, restless life is his lack of reliability which Sal experiences first hand when he's sick and abandoned in Mexico.

Kerouac evokes the mythography of American pioneers and lonesome cowboys ('this road,' I told him, 'is also the route of old American outlaws') even as Sal, and even Dean, seem to yearn for some kind of home that always evades them: 'so I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for'.

And Kerouac's prose is astounding.

-----------------------------------------------
n  

Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.

n
A blazing, youthful book, packed with energy and sadness, rebellion and disaffection: don't read this if you're looking for a plot or some kind of linear storytelling, read it for the evocation of mood, and Kerouac's 'spontaneous writing' that fizzes with vigour and force.

Set in 1947 and based around 4 road trips across the US, Kerouac's alter ego, Sal Paradise, follows his idol Dean Moriarty in an odyssey of wildness: drink, drugs, hook-ups, jazz. The boy-men fall in love again and again, abandoning women across the country because this is a masculine bromance and there's no real place for girls.

Only during the 3rd and 4th trips, a darker element seeps in: Sal realises that Moriarty is a 'holy con-man' and that the other side of freedom is a rootlessness that cuts deep - one of the things that Dean Moriarty is searching for is his lost father, and he duplicates and multiplies that loss as he gets girls pregnant then leaves them, sprinkling fatherless children across the country.

There are moments when we want to reach into the book and shake some sense into Sal, particularly when he sentimentalises what it might mean to be black in 1940s America: 'I was only myself... wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America' - hmm. The casual misogyny and homophobia of the time also have a place here as, apparently, rejection of stifling social conventions only goes so far...

Nevertheless, there's something deeply hypnotic about Kerouac's prose and the final journey when Sal, at least, has started to understand the cost of the road is poignant and close to philosophical:
n  

... the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the 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.

n

This book bored me to tears. I dreaded each time I had to read this.

On The Road is a book about a man child young man named Sal who hitches rides across the country, giggling, having a string of meaningless relationships with characters that never reappear, and Sal worshipping his bestie, Dean, who has very little redeeming qualities.

The beginning of this book was promising. I thought it was going to be like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it wasn’t funny.

In terms of a travelogue, this isn’t it. At one point, Sal travels to Detroit, but there aren’t even any details.

The entire book is some form of “Hey, man. That’s cool. That’s right. Cool. It’s all cool. Let’s go find some girls. Let’s talk about talking. Let’s hitch a ride.” Nothing happened.

Sorry, Sal, Dean just isn't that into you.

Some critics argue that On the Road is a metaphor for the lost freedom of the American Dream. That is laughable. Sal and Dean have no ambition and no morals. Sal is offered a job with Eddie at one point, but he doesn't show up. Instead of putting in a bit of hustle, he bums off of women, particulary heartbreaking is his abuse of Terry, a single mother. Sal literally sleeps when he is supposed to be working!

Additionally, Sal is a poverty poser. Of course, it is all fun and games for him because he can always give his aunt a jingle and request more money as soon as being poor isn't fun anymore. She unquestioningly sends him cash without a moment's notice. How convenient!

This book is astonishingly bad. Although the characters were unpredictable, the character response was not. Anything could have happened, but the characters would just say something along the lines of, “That’s right! It’s all good.” So the suspense never increased. Good grief! I was so bored that I was hoping that Dean would step in front of a train so the book could finally be over.

In 1951, Jack Kerouac wrote this book on a giant scroll with no formatting and no paragraph breaks. It should have stayed on the scroll. The jumbo paragraphs don’t help, and this book does feel like one really long rambling that doesn’t go anyplace.

At least now I can go around telling people that I have read Kerouac but I would rather have the 11 hours that I spent reading this back.

How much I spent:
Softcover text (Penguin Classics version) - £9.99 from Waterstones
Audiobook – 1 Audible Credit (Audible Premium Plus Annual – 24 Credits Membership Plan $229.50 or roughly $9.56 per credit)

2025 Reading Schedule
JantA Town Like Alice
FebtBirdsong
MartCaptain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
AprtWar and Peace
MaytThe Woman in White
JuntAtonement
JultThe Shadow of the Wind
AugtJude the Obscure
SeptUlysses
OcttVanity Fair
NovtA Fine Balance
DectGerminal

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what

I read this book as a teenager and fell in love with the descriptive imagery and likable, flawed characters traveling across the country. I am currently reading Lincoln Highway by Amor Towels and seeing the parallels between plot and adventure.

Taking place in the early 1950s, two friends hit the road across the country, stopping by and narrating their experiences. While not autobiographical, the story is based on Kerouac's actual experiences.

Many people found this book to be one-dimensional and lacking in depth. However, I found his observations to be honest and beautiful.

As a teen, I took to the road a few times, traveling from Iowa to Oregon with my family. I would journal my experiences only after being drawn to Kerouac's words.

Kerouac's prose takes you on the road with him, enjoying the sights, sounds, and experiences while simultaneously paying heed to the author's emotional vices, values, and sometimes staggering virtues.

n  I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future...And there in the blue air I saw for the first time, far off, the great and snowy tops of the Rocky Mountainsn

اصلا خود داستان را که کنار بگذاریم فعلا که شیفته ی خود این نویسنده ی جدیدالکشف ام شدم. حالا قلمش بماند. حالا بماند که ترجمه اش چقدر خوب است. داشتم فکر میکردم کاش میشد جک کرواک را از زیر خاک بیرون کشید، زنده اش کرد، با او چند صباحی ول گشت و عصر را در یک کافه ای جایی قهوه خورد. فکر کنم ا�� آن دست پسرهایی می بود که در عین حال که طرز رفتار و زندگی پرهرج و مرجشان به طرز دهشت انگیزی حرصم میدهد، نمی توانم عاشقشان نشوم.
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از مقدمه: «در راه» را کتاب مقدس نسل ادبی بیت می دانند؛ در کنار شعر بلند زوزه ی الن کینزبرگ که به تعبیری مانیفست این گروه از نویسندگان بعد از جنگ جهانی دوم است. نسلی که چیزی نبود جز حلقه رفقایی که «خوره ی زندگی» بودند و برخلاف نویسندگان عصاقورت داده ی معاصرشان که از آکادمی های ملانقطی بیرون می آمدند، خودآموخته هایی لاقید بودند و تعدادی شان سارق حرفه ای محسوب می شدند و اتفاقا موضوع نوشته هاشان هم چیزی نبود جز همین ماجراهای خود و دوستان شان.

ادبیات جاده ای امریکا هم همواره سنتی قوی بود که بی گمان در راه به تأسی از آن نوشته شده است. می توان رد این آثار را تا تعابیر رمانتیک والت ویتمن از «راه گشوده» پی گرفت تا آثار اولا داکوبامز ، برده ی سیاه پوستی که هزینه ی آزادی خود را پرداخت و به دنبال آن چه خود «امریکایی بودن» می نامید به سفر در امریکا پرداخت و سال 1793 دو کتاب در این باب چاپ کرد.
اما بعد از در راه کرواک و تصویر این رمان از جاده به عنوان محملی برای یافتن سعادت و بینش بود که خیلی هیپی های مفتی سوار راهی جاده ها شدند و آثاری نظیر ذن و فن نگاه داشت موتور سیکلت به نگارش در آمده اند. به پیروی از در راه بود که نویسنده ی دیگری از نسل بیت به نام کن کِسی، نویسنده ی رمان پرواز بر فراز آشیانه ی فاخته، عزم کرد اتوبوسی کهنه را با رنگ های تند مرسوم در دهه ی 1960 رنگ کند و نیل کسیدی، همسفر جک کرواک در رمان در راه را بنشاند پشت فرمان تا امریکا را بگردند.

You couldn't pay me enough to re-read this baby now. Well, okay, I'd probably do it for £200. Alright, £100. Cash.

Kerouac took over from Steinbeck as the guy I had to read everything by when I was a young person. Steinbeck himself took over from Ray Bradbury. All three American males with a sentimental streak as wide as the Rio Grande.

Whole thing nearly turned me into a weepy hitchhiker who plays saxophone while he waits for a ride, then gets abducted by aliens who are these very kind blue globes, I know it sounds crazy, blue globes, right, & who take him back to 1922 where he persuades the boss of the local fruit farm syndicate to double the workers' wages and build a school.

Here’s the thing : there’s a time to read Kerouac, and it’s not your thirties. I first read “On the Road” when I was 19 and I loved how meandering and crazy it was… and in retrospect, I know it’s because I was similarly scattered and unhinged. When one’s in that headspace, it’s natural to appreciate that there’s a classic out there that captures the sort of spontaneous madness that most people only experience in the first half of their twenties. I re-read it when I was twenty-two, and I still thought it was brilliant. Reading it at thirty-three made me cringe way more than I had imagined it would…

In historical context, what Kerouac did with this book was revolutionary and it’s important to remember that: the book is dynamic, it threw caution and literary standards to the wind and ran as far and as fast as it could from what Jack considered to be “establishment”. And on that basis, it's worth checking out.

Of course nothing that goes on in this book makes a lick of sense to me now. The lifestyle these characters have is beyond unsustainable and their carelessness with each other is actually quite distressing. And while obviously, the way male characters handle female characters infuriated me, the ladies in this book don’t have much in the way of redeeming qualities either: being “free” is all nice and good, but it should never ever mean treating other human beings like garbage. And there is a copious amount of that in “On the Road”, which made me really sad. It’s no secret that this is a roman à clef and that most of the events described in the novel are a version of something that actually happened, and these people creating so much suffering for themselves and those around them weighs the book down like an anchor. The idolization of Dean Moriarty – who is an epic douchewaffle – is definitely the part that was the hardest to digest this time around. Not to mention the glaring hypocrisy and pseudo-intellectual pretentiousness.

The hallucinatory descriptions of trips, both physical and psychological are still entrancing and often poetic, even when they are incoherent. As an ode to freewheeling youth, it has moments of inspiring and lyrical bravado. But I can’t escape the knowledge that all of Sal Paradise’s promises are empty, and that Kerouac never truly found what he was looking for.

I’ll be revisiting his other books eventually, to see if they hold up on their own, but do yourself a favor: if you read this book when you were young(er) and loved it, leave it alone.

DUDE ON THE ROAD SHITS PANTS IN MEXICO