On the Road (1957). Detailed description

Kerouac’s most popular novel has retained notoriety not just for its greatness, but also for the mythic story surrounding its creation. Written over the course of a three-week creative spurt in April and May 1951, On the Road was first completed as one long paragraph on a roll of teletype paper that Kerouac inserted into his typewriter so that he could transcribe his thoughts freely, without the time-consuming burden of removing and reinserting pages. The result, a 175,000-word single-spaced block of text, would not see publication for six years but would eventually change the face of fiction writing.

In this novel, Kerouac began to experiment with what would become his trademark style of writing, which he called “spontaneous prose.” Inspired by a 40,000-word letter he had received from his close friend Neal Cassady, as well as the improvisational style of the jazz music he first became enthralled with as a student in New York City, Kerouac wrote an outpouring of thoughts and emotions, creating repetitious patterns and lengthy sentences that flowed from one idea to the next. Though editors at Viking Press, to make it more publishable, pared down On the Road, it retained the raw energy and unique prosody of Kerouac’s manuscript and was eventually released in its final form in 1957.

The novel is divided into four major sections, with a brief concluding segment. Like most of Kerouac’s novels, On the Road is an autobiographical tale presented using the narrative tools of fiction. The novel has a first-person narrator, Sal Paradise, who is based on Kerouac himself. The novel’s events span a period of Kerouac’s life from around Christmas 1946 to October 1950, although the action of the novel takes place over the course of 24 months. Each section depicts a cross-country road trip embarked upon by Paradise, and the events in between trips are glossed over in just a few sentences. The months between are not important; the novel’s intent is to portray a life lived on the open road.

The book opens with Sal’s life-altering introduction to Dean Moriarty, a character based on the charismatic derelict Neal Cassady, a Denver native who ran in the same social circle as Kerouac in New York City in the 1940s. The bohemian group of intellectuals and writers included the future Beat generation greats Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, to whom Kerouac assigns the pseudonyms Carlo Marx and Old Bull Lee, respectively. Instantly charmed by Dean’s naive intellectual yearnings, as well as his ebullience and lust for life, Sal feels inspired to indulge his restless yearnings by traveling to San Francisco.

The first section of the novel documents this first road trip, on which Paradise buses and hitchhikes his way from the East Coast to the West, stopping briefly in Denver to visit Carlo and Dean. After arriving in San Francisco, he overstays his welcome at the home of his old friend Remi Boncoeur, and on his way to Los Angeles, he meets a Mexican woman named Terry with whom he becomes romantically involved for the next several weeks. They work seasonal labor together picking cotton, but when the season ends in October, Sal leaves her and returns to New York.

The second section continues the story over a year later, when Paradise is visiting his family in Testament, Virginia, during the Christmas season of 1948. Unexpectedly, Dean shows up with his exwife, Marylou, and their friend Ed Dunkel in Dean’s then-brand-new car, a Hudson, and the group takes off on a whirlwind cross-country trek, driving nonstop from Testament to New Jersey, back to Testament, to New York, to New Orleans to visit Bull Lee and leave Ed Dunkel with his wife, Galatea, and finally to California. While the trip is exhilarating, it ends, as Sal’s first trip, does, in abandonment and disappointment. Dean leaves Marylou (and Sal) to be with Camille, a different girlfriend, with whom he has a daughter, and Sal plans to take a bus back to New York. Before departing, Paradise relates, “We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care” (178).

In section 3, though, Sal and Dean’s relationship triggers what the critic Warren French calls the novel’s “emotional climax” (French 36). After spending some time alone in Denver to find Dean, Sal brings Dean back to San Francisco, where Sal is living with Camille and their daughter, Amy. Camille kicks Dean out after a huge fight, and Sal suggests that they travel to Italy together. At the moment of his suggestion, the two men briefly stare at each other, and Sal thinks, “It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tormented mental categories” (189-190).

Though Sal demonstrates a brotherly commitment to Dean, their relationship begins to deteriorate, as do Dean’s relationships with his friends and family. Galatea Dunkel and the wives of his other friends have wished him ill as a result of his poor treatment of Camille, and upon visiting a cousin and a childhood friend in Denver, Dean is told that his family no longer wishes to be associated with him. He meets a woman named Inez at a party and decides to move in with her, once again abandoning the other women in his life, his daughter, and lastly, Sal.

The novel’s fourth section picks up at a point in Kerouac’s life after his first novel, The Town and the City, had given him moderate financial success. Sal decides to use the money from his book to travel west, this time leaving Dean behind in New York. However, Dean joins Sal in Denver, with the excuse of obtaining a fast, cheap divorce from Camille while in Mexico. Along with their friend Stan Shephard, they venture to the Mexican town of Gregoria, where they encounter a fantasyland of marijuana, alcohol, and prostitutes. After a wild time, they drive on to Mexico City, where Sal develops dysentery and a fever so high that he experiences delirium. Having obtained his divorce papers, Dean rushes back to New York, leaving Sal behind for the last time. Sal narrates, “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” (302). Sal decides not to complain; that is just the way Dean is.

In the brief fifth part, Kerouac wraps up the narrative. Dean divorces Camille, marries Inez, and returns to San Francisco to stay with Camille. Sal meets “the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for,” and they agree “to love each other madly” (304). At the end of the novel, Sal bids Dean good-bye and turns to a more stable lifestyle, although he tells the reader that he still thinks of Dean Moriarty when he thinks about the sprawling countryside of the American landscape and the unpredictability of everyday life.

The 1957 publication of On the Road not only opened the door for Kerouac’s later, more experimental dabbling in “spontaneous prose,” but legitimated the work of writers struggling to fit into traditional forms. While the American author Truman Capote responded to On the Road with his famous dismissal of it as literature “That’s not writing, it’s typing,” Kerouac’s fictionalized account of real-life events paved the way for Capote’s work with his own groundbreaking “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood (1966). And while Kerouac’s writing style signals a departure from convention, his novel simultaneously situates itself within Western literary tradition. Kerouac modeled his early writing on the works of the American fiction writer Thomas Wolfe, and while On the Road is a departure from Kerouac’s earlier imitations, Kerouac credits Wolfe with his initial yearnings to travel and observe the country.

Moreover, On the Road is a modern example of the picaresque novel, a literary term invented to refer to Spanish novels in the 16th century and used by scholars to define a narrative text that relates episodes in the adventures of a roguish hero. As such, On the Road may be associated with such celebrated works as Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615), Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

In turn, On the Road has become a part of the American literary canon as one of the foremost representations of the Beat generation. Harshly criticized at the time of its first publication, On the Road represented to many American readers a manual for destroying the fabric of society by engaging in drug and alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity, and general social upheaval. To others it was one of the first documents of an emerging bohemian counterculture, with which people from all walks of life who felt oppressed by mainstream cultural values could identify and relate. Though in his lifetime Kerouac chose to dissociate himself from both politics and later subcultures like the hippies of the 1960s, his work undeniably influenced artists and activists at a crucial time in post-World War II American culture. And as time has passed, Kerouac’s novel continues appeal to those who feel at odds with societal norms, and to inspire others to live and write in unconventional ways.

For Discussion or Writing
1. Discuss the roles that Kerouac assigns to women in the novel.

2. Kerouac often uses symbolic names when assigning pseudonyms to his fictionalized characters. Discuss possible symbolic meanings in On the Road of the name of Kerouac’s character, Sal Paradise.

3. At the start of On the Road, Sal refers to “the East of my youth and the West of my future,” dreaming of the West as a land of opportunity, natural beauty, and cowboys. After the events of the novel, does Paradise still have the same idealized notion of the West? How do his travels and encounters on the road change the way he thinks about both the East and the West?

4. On the Road has been said to have three major characters: Sal, Dean, and the American landscape. Discuss how the setting in this novel is as much a character as either of its two leading men.

5. Warren French writes, “On the Road is a traditional tale of youth’s disillusionment, perhaps closest in the American tradition to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby” (French 44). Compare and contrast the two novels. How do issues of social class affect each of the novels differently?