Customer Reviews

On the Road

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Published in 1957, this autobiographical novel by Jack Kerouac captured the spirit that was seething underneath 1950s conformity. Myth has it that he typed it non-stop for three weeks, using one long continuous sheet of paper. I understand it went through several drafts after that but it still holds the immediacy of that marathon typing session, the staccato rhythm of the words creating improvised rhythm across the page with little, if any punctuation.

The narrator, Sal Paradise, is on an epic quest, one that takes him back and forth across the country with Dean Moriarity who is based on the real-life Neal Cassady. Dean, the reform school escapee who specializes in stealing cars, is Sal's mentor. And it is the automobile that is their chariot, which keeps them constantly in motion. Dean's madness is glorified, as is his ability to do whatever he pleases. There are a lot of drugs in the book, but liquor seems to be their drug of choice. They leave the heroin for a character loosely based on the real William Burroughs. Women drift in and out of the story, usually as one of Dean's lovers who he treats terribly. Dean treats everyone terribly though, abandoning Sal on several occasions, once while Sal was suffering from dysentery while they were in Mexico. Sal, however, always forgives Dean, seeing him as a god-like hero, no matter what he does.

There's more to the book than the story though. The book is a trip, in every sense of the word. With the simple force of his writing, Kerouac took me on an adventure. With him I crisscrossed America, hitchhiking, walking, taking buses. With him I sat in a car driven by Dean Moriarity, speeding for hours at 110 miles an hour and not even thinking about a seatbelt. I met the pathetic women who loved Dean and didn't feel a bit sorry for them. I felt the quest in Dean's heart for his hobo father who he constantly searches for. And, I experienced the jazz, felt the heat and smelled the sweat in the many small bars, felt my head reel from the whisky and the sound all around me, stayed awake all night listening to sounds and being alone with the music in a room full of people. Yes, I felt I was there with the travelers, enjoying vicariously the thrills and the chills and knowing this would be my only entry into that world. Jack Kerouac eventually became an alcoholic and died an early death, but I'm personally grateful for this book he left behind and the experience of reading it. Highly recommended.

On the Road, Jack Kerouac's epic of road travel and search for meaning in the late 1940s, was written in three weeks time, typed on a long scroll, which was really several pieces of paper taped together. Kerouac's writing has a stream of conscious, spastic nature, although it went through many years of revisions before being published. The story fictionally recounts true events in the writer's life, particularly those with Neal Cassidy (Dean Moriarty in the book), whom Sal, the Kerouac character, seems to have had an infatuated crush on. From New York to California and Mexico Sal drives, or rather rides, and comes across various characters and cities. The novel helped to launch the Beat movement and has influenced countless writers, artists, and readers alike, and has been deemed one of the best novels of 20th-century American literature. Significantly, it made America a literary subject.

I wanted to like this book. I really, really did. I was prepared to be blown away and taken on a literary adventure of meaning and wonder, excitement and energy. I read, and waited, to no avail. I read some more, but it soon became apparent that this would not be the book for me. Despite this, I grudgingly soldiered on and completed it a few days later than I had anticipated to (I usually breeze through fiction without struggle), as I continuously put it back on my shelf only to talk myself into trying again. I'm glad I did, but found that the book's legend is far more interesting than the actually story.

Split into four sections, each consecutive one involving a different road trip with more details and a shorter time-span, I found myself also becoming consecutively more involved as the book went on. The first section I found, unfortunately, tedious and little more than a listing of things he did and places he went. The following section was not as eye-rolling, and the third was tolerable. The fourth was actually interesting. There was throughout, of course, the occasional poetic and insightful passage, but they were few and far between and not really worth the effort to find. The most unfortunate flaw of the novel is that it is actually quite uninteresting. It would have made an intriguing (and bearable) novella, but its length feels frustratingly unjustified.

Furthermore, and this is no fault of Kerouac, the book is hardly what popular culture has touted it to be. The text is not rebellious, but actually quite conservative. It is not forward-looking, but nostalgic. The roads that the men travel upon are by the 1950s (the book was published in 1957) of little significance as Eisenhower was quickly building up interstate freeways. Kerouac's memoirs are really a sort of nostalgia for a disappearing era. And the characters, really, are hardly rebels. Instead they drift from place to place seeking excitement, only to find the same dull existence in each setting. In the second half of the book Sal begins to grow tired of the road, and of Dean, as he sees more and more of the same. Also, Sal often feels content to be a spectator rather than a participant, watching the antics of others from a safe distance. Truly, the men are misfits. In an age when men were expected to be unemotional, solitary bread-winners, Sal is thoughtful and sensitive, indeed, tenderness between men (not sexual, as that was omitted from the original draft) is an important aspect of the novel, and he is continuously asking his aunt (mother, in life), whom he still lives with, to send him money. In this way they were unique, disenfranchised maybe, but they were not rebelling against anything. Mostly they get drunk and try to get laid in a familiar fraternity style. The characters are lonely and insecure, not hipsters or nonconformists. Their journey is about a search for stability, not spontaneity. These are not criticisms of the novel, but merely observations, and are actually the elements that make story vaguely readable.

For all these reasons and more it is an important piece of Americana, and it is an interesting commentary for its time, about its time. However, great literature it is not. In fact, I can't bring myself to recommend that people spend their time going through Kerouac's thoughts, which usually amount to things being "mad," or his journal-like passages of events that tend to feel more like the notes he took about an account to be later revised into a yet-to-be-finished version. For another road story of the same period, published around the same time, take a detour and check out Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which is phenomenal literature, rather than a literary phenomenon. Some may say it is a victim of its own hype, which nothing can ever live up to, but I've read some classics where that hype has been more than appropriate. Kerouac, the man and his book, is one that people tend to have very strong feelings about, either positive or negative, and perhaps he does speak to the heart of some readers. This reader, however, was unimpressed and unmoved. On the Road's importance today is more in what it symbolizes, rather than what it is.

On The Road is probably one of the greatest works of the 20th Century that has gone unrecognized by society and the world as a whole. Kerouac's style is masterful, precise, and blazingly descriptive. It's a virtual miracle that he isn't more popular than he is. There's a certain romance to On The Road. A lone figure, Sal Paradise, starts out from New England to head for the West Coast. He has no idea what will happen along the way, and God only knows what he'll do once he gets there! His counterpart, Dean Moriarty is the person most of us would like to be, but can't. He's a figure built on irresponsibility, charming ignorance, and the mentality that will get him out of any bad situation. Paradise goes all over this land with his comrade in an attempt to find himself, and realizes that all he had to do was look in his own city for solace. All he would ever need was within his grasp the whole time. This book is full of descriptive detail and a streak of knowledge that only a true figure who lived his life "on the road" would know. I recommend this book for anyone who has read Ernest Hemingway's work especially. Just as Hemingway was the epitome of the Lost Generation, so Kerouac is the epitome of the Beat Generation. I also strongly recommend this book for anyone who feels they need to travel, or expand their horizons in order to find themselves. They'll be met with an astonishing truth after reading this novel.

To appreciate this book you have to catch it at the right time in your life. I'm not talking age(though for most it's around eighteen), I'm talking about the limbo between responsibility and childhood. The ether-peak where you can see the world in all it's glory but have yet to figure out how to touch it. Kerouac was quite capable of putting things down conventially, The Town and the City, but he decided to go out and "roll is bones". For that he deserves more credit than he got. This book is great in its portrayal of The Beats' years before the maelstrom of fame hit them. It is the perfect romantic youth handbook.

Read it before you take that summer off before college.

Read it again before you go to Europe after college.(While you're in France read Henry Miller.)

Read it, learn it, then throw it away and forget about it and live with a razor on your tongue and roman candles on your heels.

P.S. The title and the "roll your bones" line are from a reading Kerouac did on the Tonight Show of the last page of THE book, with some improv thrown in. Much better than just ink and paper. Check it out in the box set.

As a junior in college, I was hesitant to read a Kerouac novel because of the negative connentations associated with the "Beats". While contemplating reading "On the Road", a friend nakedly asked me, "isn't that book about drugs?" My reply "I don't think so", couldn't mask my nervousness about the content of "On the Road". Was I about to read another dated novel about a scene whose time has passed? Well let me assure the quisical reader that this novel is the complete opposite of tired and dated. Kerouac is an amazing, inventive, and charismatic writer who entertains with every word. I assure you this novel is as entertaining as advertised. The plot revolves around the adventures of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarity(thinly veiled altered egos of Kerouac and Neal Cassidy) as they cross the country in search of an illusive yet ever present freedom. Enjoyable scenes

1. Paradise's first trip from the East Coast to the West Coast. The descriptions are joyously vivid and intensely enjoyable. Wow!

2. Kerouac's descriptions of a jazz show in San Francisco. His enthusiasm for jazz is well-documented but this scene conveys the love for jazz like no other author has done before or after.

Enjoy this novel with an open mind and a love for powerful writing.

I just finished reading On the Road today and although it took me awhile I think I've fallen in love with it. The views of life that Kerouac expressed are those that I would like to incorporate into my own. Every word of this novel breathes, shouts, screams freedom and takes the reader back to a time in our history when things were simple and true yet so wonderfully amazing. Reading this book inspired me to begin writing some of my own. In fact reading this book inspires me to shout from the rooftops about the joyful spontaneous chaos that is life! Kerouac had such talent -- I marked passages throughout this novel that moved me and enthralled me. This is the kind of life i would love to live -- not held down by anything, free to roam, free to be a person and fully experience life. Kerouac's writing has a wonderful simplicity to it that makes it so sincere. It's fantastically vibrant, passionate, and pure. I cannot wait to read this novel again. It took me to an America that I would have loved to have been a part of, an America that exists now only as history and memories.

"Kerouac is the man" is a phrase I heard after reading "On the Road" for the first time, incidently from the same person who had recommended that I read it. I too discovered that, Kerouac is indeed "the man." To me, "On the Road" is a stroke of pure genious, presenting a way of life that I never thought could exsist. Kerouac shows all of life's beauties and depressions, with such zest and wonder that I felt truly inspired. Although "On the Road" lacks a traditional plot line, I never felt the need for one once I got used to Kerouac's almost poetic style. During the first chapter, I kept thinking that this book wasn't about anything, and that I would never be able to finish it. Then I realized, that it is not what the characters were doing that was so important to the story, but the character's emotions and the ideas presented that mattered. While watching Sal Paradise bum around America with Dean Moriarty, the reader gets caught up in how wonderful it is to be alive. Because of "On The Road," I have seen so many things in a different light, and noticed things I used to take for granted. I have begun to find joy in different places and no longer search and strive for perfection. I'm not saything that because of this book my life turned 180 degrees, it didn't, but my eyes are now open to ideas that I had never before thought about. Because of this wonderful new perspective, I truly believe that "Kerouac is the man."

In a time reverse way, I felt dated, reading this very modern piece of writing with my postmodern consciousness. At first I felt like I was in the ejector seat of a convertible without seatbelts doing 110 MPG with a drugged or drunk driver commandeering the steering wheel. Well, we the readers, not to mention the characters, are. But all the boozing, drugs, women, and breaking of various Commandments don't have the consequences we'd expect in a more recent novel. Instead, we learn about the holy pursuit of getting high on life, especially as it is lived on the edge. A gang of characters is wrapped like a hurricane's winds around Dean Moriarty whose bipolar (postmodern judgment there) energy flows inspire antic cross country road trips across several years. In a book that's fueled by organic movement, there comes the day when the characters have to move on and away after they have achieved the highest (literally) point in their travels, and that's the ultimate consequence, that the momentum dissipates.

I had put off reading this book, thinking I couldn't handle one long abstract rant, which it isn't, though I'd picked up that impression somewhere. Kerouac sings like Whitman in a voice that is at once poetic and yet concretely journalistic. It is urgent, thus propelling its content, peeling away the past and future. There is artistic skill and knowledge at work in every sentence.

I read the critical introduction last, so it would not color my experience. It is an excellent introduction, one addressing more autobiographical detail than text, but all the same, read it as an afterward; I think Kerouac would want you to live the book unfettered by context.

Clearly, the place of Kerouac's On the Road as one of America's greatest novels of the twentieth century no longer needs to be justified. To acknowledge that this text defined Kerouac's generation and informed each successive generation goes without saying. When, however, a reader begins to strip away the thin veneer (Michel Foucault would call this "archaeology") of Kerouac's "autobiographical" novel what one finds is something more resonating and universal than simply two guys getting their "kicks" while traveling the roads of America. The common, albeit fallacious, belief that Kerouac wrote this novel in three days undermines the numerous revisions and deletions that make up the final published book that we know as On the Road. Kerouac carefully constructed his texts around a vast personal knowledge of literature and the myths of his country. In fact Kerouac hadn't even written his dictum on "Spontaneous Prose" when this novel was published (read Visions of Cody for the spontaneous rendering of On the Road). When the book is read slowly, with a critical eye, what one finds is a broad picaresque tapestry loaded with symbolism and American folklore that develops and unfolds in a clearly developmental way. Each trip across the country is for a different reason and has its own agenda--this is the true, though often unrealized, beauty of the book. The inability of Sal and Dean to find satisfaction at any given point in their travels not only attests to their personal restlessness but, in Kerouac's hands, becomes a human restlessness that crosses all ages and continents. Of course, by inextricably tying human restlessness to the "American dream" Kerouac presents a view of life where the "ideal" and the "real" can never exist cohesively. More importantly, the book is about our own mortality as a country and as individuals. If you've read this book once, read it again

The discovery of 'On The Road' has (excuse the cliché) changed my life irreversibly. I found it to be the most riveting, energetic, powerful and inspirational work I have ever had the fortune to read. My poor friends, and just about anyone else who has cared to listen, have had to endure my crazed ramblings of passion and attempts to describe the sheer genius and delightful brilliance of Kerouac and his work. I cannot begin to describe how much this book has affected my entire perception of the World and everything within it. Kerouac feeds the itch within anyone who has a rambling soul, leaving the reader craving for their dreams, ultimately, anyone who gets this, anyone who truly appreciates it, I am confident will never be quite the same. Every scene, every pure, brilliant landscape, every character is crafted with such skill and subtle, tactical brilliance; you fall in love with each one. Sparkling, pulsing dialogue, evocative simple depiction, passion, craving; this book is so powerful; combining enigmatic and isolated reflection with irresistible freedom that reflects the ultimate lifestyle of anyone who just cannot stop moving. It is so modest and subtle...Kerouac is a literary God. Please read this. Buy it. Buy a copy for everyone you know! I can't imagine that I could ever have lived without knowing, without ever realising.... This book should be handed out in schools and workplaces and universities and streets all over the world. Please, just read it!!

So, in response to other reviewers, who I can almost believe have never felt the want of freedom, have never felt the exhilarating magic of the road: Can you not see the pure and simple LIFE of this story? I cannot believe anyone could dismiss this. I was devastated to reach the final page; it is so rare to find such a gift. So please, show me a more faultless achievement of a novel, for I would love to read it. But I believe you'll have difficulties- this is as close to perfection as it gets.

And to those who have the soul and the insight into the heart of a real angel of a man, to share in my breathless admiration, there is a poem by William Burroughs that may interest you:

Remembering Jack Kerouac

Writers are, in a way, very powerful indeed. They write the script for the reality film. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. Now if writers could get together into a real tight union, we'd have the world right by the words. We could write our own universes, and they would all be as real as a coffee bar or a pair of Levis, or a prom in the Jazz Age. Writers could take over the reality studio. So they must not be allowed to find out that they can make it happen. Keroac understood this long before I did. Life is a dream, he said.