Book Dunce is a series in which one of our writers finally succumbs to the lure of a book that has long been a big part of our culture that they have never read. Seen through fresh eyes, we evaluate, enjoy and sometimes get bored by these titans of mental real estate.
I first encountered Jack Kerouac’s On the Road during my freshman year of college; my roommate’s nose was buried in the book for a couple weeks and she insisted that I read it when she was done. Of course soon after that I was engulfed in a sea of assigned reading and forgot about it completely. Years later, people were shocked to find that I was reading this novel for the first time, and I can see why…it is truly original and without a doubt a classic.
On the Road is based on Kerouac’s adventures with his friend Neal Cassady and epitomizes the “Beat Generation” of writers in the 1950s. The book chronicles the wild and crazy travels of protagonist Sal Paradise and his friend and idol Dean Moriarty, along with a cluster of other friends, lovers, and random strangers they encounter throughout several trips across the United States and one final, life-changing trip to Mexico. Sal’s wanderlust pulls him repeatedly across the country, be it by car, train or on foot. He finds himself in all number of situations with every type of character and in every state of intoxication imaginable, always “rushing” everywhere and most of the time following the “mad,” elusive Dean.
This is a mind-blowing read for several different reasons. First off, it gives a glimpse into an entirely different USA than most Americans, even those who lived during the same time as Kerouac, ever experienced. The beauty of Sal is that though he himself is white and middle class, he embraces everyone he encounters throughout his travels with an open mind, which throws him into all sorts of fascinating situations that transcend race and class. He goes from hitching a ride through the Midwest in the back of a truck with some hobos to attending the opera dressed to the nines in Denver to picking cotton in central California with his Mexican-American lover Terry before starting all over time and time again.
Sal’s reality struck me as very different from anything I have ever read or been told about the ’40s and ’50s, and the fact that his adventures were based on Kerouac’s own made them even more enjoyable. Sal mentions nothing of pressure to focus on his career or settle down and get married, has no problem with the fact that he lives in his aunt’s home when he is not traveling and does not care at all how others perceive him. I found myself jealous of his ability to blindly let life happen to him without knowing or caring what would happen next, and I can only imagine how many spur-of-the-moment road trips this novel has inspired over time.
Also fascinating is Sal’s admiration and love for Dean, who is essentially an insane, self-absorbed conman. Sal is fully aware of this, but something draws him to Dean- in fact, the crazier and more unacceptable Dean’s behavior is, the more devoted to him Sal becomes. Even when everyone else has recognized Dean’s true colors and denounced him and “Dean, by virtue of his enormous series of sins, was becoming the Idiot, the Imbecile, the Saint of the lot” Sal defends Dean, telling their friends “I’ll bet you want to know what he does next and that’s because he’s got the secret that we’re all busting to find and it’s splitting his head wide open and if he goes mad don’t worry, it won’t be your fault but the fault of God.”
The secret that Sal refers to is the solution to that unexplainable, ever-present human longing for more. This longing is what drives Sal and Dean to madly traverse the country and indulge in as many girls, drugs, parties and deep conversations as possible. As Sal profoundly explains it, “The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.”
I was thrown upon reading this sentence because all my life I’ve been trying to identify that exact feeling of restlessness and vague dissatisfaction that myself and so many of my peers constantly experience, and all along it’s been spelled out in the pages of this book. Sometimes it seems that love or success will quell this feeling, but in the end it never does. This to me is the driving theme of On the Road, the constant chasing of some unknown but extremely pressing need, though perhaps the real value in life lies in the experiences we have along the way.
by Jessica Bari
