On the road by Jack Kerouac

On the road is a book by Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac was a key figure in the beat generation, which was a social movement in the united states in the forties and fifties that grew into the sixties and seventies hippies. Basically.

On the road is considered a masterpiece and a defining work. Bob Dylan, along with a host of other creative-slash-rebel types love it, in particular the kind of creative rebels who would get an invite to an interview on radio two. Its kind of a big deal, and it’s one of the least enjoyable books i’ve ever read. This book is a book-length boast of how Jack Kerouac fucked his way across america, passing commentary on the daughters of everyone he slept with as he ent.

They say Jack wrote the first draft of the book on a single roll of paper in three weeks. Maybe it was three months, or three days. I am almost certain it was not three hours. Regardless, it takes the regularity and authority of three and attributes legend status to a man because of his ability to write a lot in a short amount of time. They also say this vision is nonsense and that he didn’t write it on a single roll of paper, and that it probably wasn’t any temporally threed period.

That’s a shame, because the prose feels rushed and stilted. Had this been a product of some level of frantic and drug-aided sprint i would perhaps have had less of a problem, and might even have found it oddly endearing in hindsight. Instead, on the first reading i considered it lazy and lacking in talent, and in hindsight, i considered it the same. He uses the same words repeatedly in close proximity: suddenly he saw Dean. He suddenly tried to pick up a teen. The poeticism was lacking with such vigour it was almost poetic. But in the same way an unmade bed is only almost modern art, Kerouac’s poetry only almost managed to be a modern classic.

But my main issue isn’t the writing style; lots of people really like Kerouac’s beat poetry, and i have no problem with that. My main issue here is that Sal Paradise, aka Jack Kerouac himself, is not a likeable protagonist. The character comes across as a self-absorbed hedonist. At its core, on the road is however many pages of Sal Paradise getting with a bunch of women he describes as being a bit less attractive than he would have liked, and then feeling slightly guilty about not settling down, and then not doing anything about it to get where he wanted. As Jesus would say, he is a “hypocrite”.

Now, while i endorse stripping christianity down from its position as a bureaucratic moral-tripping nightmare to a doctrine of love dropped by a middle eastern left-of-centre country bumpkin radical, i can’t help but feel that Sal’s, and therefore Jack’s, interpretation of catholicism is a bit on the lenient side, veering into the territory of using “but i’m a catholic so god says its okay” in the same way that that one friend uses Jim’s tab to get free drinks. I’ve seen Kerouac compared to Graham Greene, a tortured catholic who writes tortured catholic epics about the torture of modern catholic life. My knowledge of Greene is more limited than i’d like, but it seems to me that he takes the religion a bit more seriously than Kerouac wants to.

There’s a lot of bad literature written, in my eyes or in anyone else’s. There are books i love that my friends hate. That’s just how art works. One thing that makes me uncomfortable about on the road is that it portrays this hedonistic and disresepectful way of living, and yet Kerouac seems to be almost universally revered. Authors are people, not gods.

Part five of on the road, the final chapter, did not redeem the book for me. But it did make me slightly less opposed to Sal. It felt somewhat like a cop out, and autobiographically it felt quite unrealistic, given the little i know about Jack’s life, child, and marriages. The final chapter of a clockwork orange comes to mind. I liked it, and it brought the words in a word circle, but it really didn’t fit the rest of the book and Kubrick’s decision to cut it from his film was the right one.

Jack isn’t a literary genius. He is impressive because he expressed his experiences as a normal person in a way that hadn’t been expressed that well before his time. Being a normal person was changing, as normal people could get so much richer, even though most of them were left with very little besides bigger dreams and faster travel opportunities. For someon like Jack, that was almost all that was needed. But you can define a generation without being exceptional. Half the point of Kerouac was that he wasn’t exceptional. He was a nobody who didn’t matter, trying to make a way and have a good time, trying to marry loyalty to his friends with loyalty to his other friends, trying to marry, trying to survive, and never forgetting to dream.

And he made mistakes, and he recorded those mistakes, and i’m grateful for that. But i wish people would notice those mistakes, and see him as just another human, too.