The Dharma Bums (1958). Detailed description

The Dharma Bums is the third of Kerouac’s most popular novels, the others being On the Road (1957) and The Subterraneans (1958). At the time of its publication, response to the novel was harsh: Critics found that it lacked the energy and edginess of his preceding work. Even his close friend and fellow Beat generation writer Allen Ginsberg, who gave it a supportive review in the Village Voice, urged Kerouac to shy away from composing “travelogues” in the future. The Dharma Bums is allegedly Kerouac’s only novel that was published without revision or rewriting and as such contains both the raw emotion characteristic of Kerouac’s confessional style, as well as the technical and structural complications inherent in a first draft.

The novel is divided only by chapter breaks, but larger, informal sections are evident in the text, though critics are in disagreement as to whether to divide the work into thirds or quarters (On the Road was in four labeled sections). The Dharma Bums documents Kerouac’s life in 1955-56, when he was living in Berkeley, California, with Allen Ginsberg. The novel opens with Kerouac’s character, in this instance assuming the name Ray Smith, riding illegally on a freight train in the company of a wandering bum whose habit of carrying a prayer by Saint Teresa leads Ray to conclude that he is a sort of spiritual figure. The Dharma Bums is, from its very first pages, one of Kerouac’s most openly spiritual works and was composed during the height of his interest in the Buddhist faith.

Indeed, most of the novel recounts Ray’s tutelage at the hands of Japhy Ryder, a Buddhist poet and scholar based on Kerouac’s real life friend and mentor Gary Snyder. Japhy teaches Ray about Buddhist poetry, mountain climbing, and liberated sexuality. Though Japhy is not present in a large middle section of the novel, his influence informs Ray’s thought processes throughout. When recounting the infamous Gallery Six reading, where Allen Ginsberg delivered his groundbreaking reading of the poem “Howl” in what is known as the “birth trauma of the Beat Generation” (here represented as Alvah Goldbook’s reading “Wail”), Kerouac focuses instead on describing Snyder’s work, which he considered more “earnest and strong and humanly hopeful” (14).

Some of the most striking passages in the book appear in Kerouac’s description of climbing the California Matterhorn with Japhy and Henry Morley (based on his friend John Montgomery). While much of the novel contains shorter, haiku-inspired sentences, in this section the reader encounters Kerouac’s trademark style of “spontaneous prose,” in which impressions and ideas are recorded in a fast, associative, jazz-inspired outburst, thus resonating with charged sensation. Describing the landscape of the Matterhorn, he writes:

The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. (62)

Ray’s climb symbolizes a retreat from stifling civilization toward an epiphany in the more spiritual setting of nature. Upon returning from their trip, Japhy refers to a “rucksack revolution,” in which young people will abandon mainstream consumer culture and travel simply throughout the American landscape. This idea enthralled Kerouac and influenced his later work, such as his 1960 essay “The Vanishing American Hobo.”

Still, Ray quickly grows tired of California society, particularly after his friend Cody Pomeray (based on Neal Cassady) leaves his neurotic girlfriend Rosie (based on Natalie Jackson) under Ray’s care in her suicide (Pomeray’s leaving results). Ray travels to North Carolina to visit his mother and sister but has a personality clash with his sister’s husband and returns to Berkeley after a few months. He and Japhy take up residence at the home of a Buddhist family in Northern California, but both seem to be growing weary of their “dharma bum” lifestyle. After one last backpacking trip Japhy goes off to Japan, and Ray, at Japhy’s suggestion, takes a job as a lookout on Desolation Peak in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. As the novel closes, Ray stands atop the peak and cries out, “Japhy . . . I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all” (244).

For Discussion or Writing
1. On his way to camp in Riverside, California, Ray experiences a brief moment of clarity in which it becomes clear to him that “the only alternative to sleeping out, hopping freights, and doing what I wanted . . . would be to just sit with a hundred other patients in front of a nice television set in a madhouse, where we could be ‘supervised’” (121). The author Ken Kesey manipulates a similar vision in his 1962 novel One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. How is Kesey’s novel similar to The Dharma Bums? How does Kesey’s intent render his work different from Kerouac’s?

2. In Buddhism, the concept of dharma refers to the teachings of the Buddha and thus suggests the revelation of ultimate truth. Using this literal definition, discuss what may be implied by Japhy Ryder’s term dharma bum.

3. Compare and contrast the different interpretations of Buddhist spirituality espoused by Ray, Japhy, and Alvah Goldbook.

4. Both On the Road and The Dharma Bums depict Kerouac’s character as a pupil and follower of a male hero and friend. How is Dean Moriarity’s role in On the Road similar to Japhy Ryder’s in The Dharma Bums? What is the significance of Kerouac’s choice to downplay the presence of Neal’s character (Cody Pomeray) in The Dharma Bums?