632 The American Century: Literature since 1945Jack Kerouac was born Jean-Louis Kerouac in Massachusetts. After a Catholic
upbringing, he roamed about the United States, taking various odd jobs, and worked
as a merchant seaman before writing the first of his semi-autobiographical novels,
The Town and the City (1950), about a family in his hometown of Lowell. On the
Road followed in 1957. It established Kerouac as the novelist of the beats, just as
“Howl” identified Ginsberg as their poet. Several books that followed were also
documents of beat consciousness, although they also reflected their author’s growing
interest in the discovery of truth or “dharma” through Zen Buddhism:
The Subterraneans (1958), The Dharma Bums (1958), Tristessa (1960), Big Sur
(1962), and Desolation Angels (1965). Other books, still beat in sensibility, were
evocations of Kerouac’s childhood: Doctor Sax (1959), Maggie Cassidy (1959), and
Visions of Gerard (1963). Still others described his search for his Breton ancestors
(Satori in Paris (1966)), his travels (Lonesome Traveler (1960)), his recollections of
his life and his friends and, in particular, of Neal Cassady, his traveling companion
(Visions of Cody (1972)). What is common to all these books, and to his poems
collected in Mexico City Blues (1959), is an urgent, rhythmic style that works through
repetition and an excited, evocative tone to create a feeling of spontaneity and
intimacy. Kerouac pushed to an intense extreme the insight of Whitman that, ideally,
who touches the book touches the man. He was also clearly inspired, as Whitman
was, by the sheer vastness, the space of the American continent: it is no accident that
the final paragraph of On the Road has the narrator contemplating that space. “So in
America when the sun goes down,” he declares, “... I... sense all that raw land that
rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going,
all the people dreaming in the immensity of it.”
On the Road, more energetically than any of Kerouac’s other novels, brings
American self and American space together, in a celebration of the vastness, the
potential of both. The protagonist and narrator is Sal Paradise. Clearly a self-portrait
of the author, Paradise is a struggling author in his mid-twenties. He tells of his
encounters with Dean Moriarty, a teenager whose soul is “wrapped up in a fast car,
a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road.” During the next five years they
travel from coast to coast, either with each other or to each other. Five trips are
described, during the course of which Dean meets and deserts different wives and
lovers. Sal has a brief affair with one of Dean’s partners and sells his novel to a
publisher. Nothing substantial, in terms of plot, seems to have happened by the end:
although, having been abandoned by him in Mexico, Sal continues to “think of Old
Dean Moriarty, the father we never found.” Plenty occurs, of course, but events
possess the fluidity of a stream, rather than the fixity of narrative form. Things
happen, and then our heroes move on to encounter something else, something new
in the experiential and fictional process. Like those heroes, the reader is initiated into
a contact with the now, life as present and process. Style and structure similarly
invite us to freewheel through the open spaces of personality and geography. This
lends a curiously amoral dimension to the fictional space Kerouac describes: the
narrative is not so much interested in evaluation as experience (which is one reason
why Dean’s casual, even brutal treatment of women receives less criticism than itGGray_c05.indd 632ray_c 05 .indd 632 8 8/1/2011 7:31:35 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 35 PM