Lesson 5
On the Road
On the Road, including pertinent background information and characteristics of the text.
Playing Sundance to Cassady
Bear in mind as you read that Sal Paradise is primarily an observer throughout the novel, the faithful reporter of the details that accumulate about Dean Moriarty. He seldom participates in the goings-on as he describes in great detail the lively figure who has captivated his imagination. Dean is the born outlaw; Sal is a sidekick, a relative innocent, and one whose relatively stable childhood contrasts hugely with Dean’s freewheeling, motherless and almost fatherless, homeless jailbird upbringing.
The contrasts between the two are many. At the beginning of the book, Sal has no driver’s license and hates to drive at all; Dean is a driving artist who set a record in Denver for stealing 500 cars in one year — as a minor. Sal is a product of New England; Dean embodies the spirit of the West, the vast untamed place. Sal, we know instinctively, has been a lifelong conformist; Dean is a contemporary outlaw who lives outside the boundaries of “proper society.” Dean is a nonstop talker and hustler; Sal is reticent and honest. Dean follows his nose down the road, a trail of pregnant wives crying in his wake, while no girls fall in love with Sal and he fathers no children. Sal plots his first hitchhiking journey with a map; instead of stealing cars, he takes buses and pays the fare with his aunt’s money.
Sal barely squeaks out of the straight and the narrow, while Dean runs around like the Energizer Bunny on drugs doing everything that Sal doesn’t dare try and never will. Dean knows no boundaries, no responsibilities, no limits, and no restraints. He is a living jazz improvisation. As the book progresses, Dean becomes bigger than life.
In fact, On the Road became an instant classic because its hero takes on epic proportions. He embodies a great American ideal, an anti-hero — someone who is repulsive and charming at the same time. Someone, dear reader, who Sal will never be, and neither will we. Dean lives life; he doesn’t read about it. He “balls the jack” while we ride alongside, thrilled and a little scared, flying through the open spaces in a car that will soon be ridden into the ground.
Because he is writing about a bona fide loveable outlaw, our narrator is bound to begin with a glorification of Dean’s crimes:
“His ‘criminality’ was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying overburst of American joy; it was Western, the west wind, an ode from the Plains, something new, long prophesied, long a-coming (he only stole cars for joy rides).” (7-8)
Notice how the narrator romanticizes the crimes themselves, relegates them to parentheses, while the crime itself is equated with joy — a geographical romance, a soul affirmation tinged with religious ecstasy. As the book progresses, Dean will be elevated to the status of an Angel and a Prophet, capital A, capital P.
And, in reality, one of the reasons that Jack Kerouac could not be the King of the Beats was because few readers realized that he was not the flamboyant Dean Moriarty, but the reporter Sal Paradise. They wanted him to be the bigger-than-life Dean Moriarty. He tried, but he just couldn’t. Throughout the novel he admits that he simply can’t keep up with Dean. The readers who idolized Kerouac as his alter ego failed to realize that he couldn’t be Dean Moriarty because Dean lived the outlaw life, and outlaws don’t sit down to write because they’re too in love with motion and seeing what’s to dig around the next bend. They’re cooking the next scheme, not simmering in front of a typewriter. Neal Cassady, the real-life Dean Moriarty, never wrote a book. He wrote long letters that inspired the prose of On the Road, but rather than writing, he lived. Full tilt.
Players in Disguise: A Guide to the Marriages of Fiction and Fact
The story you are reading is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent. A few relationships have been slightly altered as well, but all of the details and events are true. The frenetic quasi-realist who holds up his finger when he speaks, Carlo Marx, is recognizable as Allen Ginsberg; Old Bull Lee, who shoots fixes into his thousand-holed arm is Bill Burroughs. Tom Saybrook, who appears briefly, is John Clellon Holmes, and Elmo Hassel (aka the ghost of Times Square) is Herbert Huncke. Of the Denver boys, Chad King is Hal Chase, and Tim Gray is Ed White. Remi Boncoeur (“good heart”) is Henri Cru — and Kerouac was actually fired from the watchman’s job. The long-suffering Camille is Carolyn Cassady, Dean’s gal Marylou is Louanne, Inez is Diane, Terry is still anonymous, Jane is Joan Vollmer. The ex-wife he mentions in the first line is Edie Parker.
Kerouac has made some interesting alterations in the portrayals of his immediate family. One element is the same: Leo Kerouac (his father) was dead by the time the action in On the Road begins, and that is so in the novel. But instead of living with his mother, Sal lives with his aunt; her criticism of his friends matches that of his mother, however, and she did wire him money when he got stuck during his adventures. The change weakens the characterizations in the novel somewhat. He does not portray the closeness of his relationship with his aunt; a mother would be so devoted as to open her home without question and send money, but an aunt would need a great incentive to be so generous with a nephew who ran with a crowd she disapproved of. Kerouac never creates a powerful motive for the aunt’s actions. In fact, in the novel, which looks at the influence of absent parents, he never mentions his mother at all.
An interesting but less significant change is the switch in his sibling’s gender. Kerouac’s sister Caroline, or Nin, is changed to a brother, Rocco. (Remember, Kerouac’s only brother, Gerard, died when Kerouac was four.)
He changes his hometown from Lowell, Massachusetts, to Paterson, New Jersey, which is actually Ginsberg’s birthplace.
Finally, he changes his ethnicity from Franco-American to Italian-American. He may have gotten his idea for the change from his real-life comment, “There must be a lot of Italians in Sausalito.”
Mostly, though, the novel aims at precise recreation of this interval of Kerouac’s life, his opening into the greater possibilities life offered in the form of Dean Moriarty. Like Mark Twain, who captured the Mississippi River dialects on paper, Kerouac took great pains to re-create Neal Cassady’s speech patterns, which hum and throb through the novel at a remarkable pace. His own language, or Sal’s, is much more pedestrian.
Jazz in the Novel
You can see the influence of jazz in every part of the novel; it’s always playing in the background, and sometimes it rushes to the foreground as the boys run from bar to bar to hear it live. Bop inspires them all. As you read Parts Two through Five, you will notice more and more jazz; it creeps into their blood until they seek it almost instinctively. Spontaneity is the essence of jazz, and particularly of bebop and bop, the newest modes of jazz in Kerouac’s time. Spontaneity is the maddening quality Dean Moriarty embodies — you never know where he is going to go next, or what he will say, and you stick with him at peril of your life just to find out. And spontaneous describes the prose that Kerouac pioneered in On the Road. This section will discuss just a few of the many jazz highlights in the novel.
Kerouac even punctuates his work so that you can feel the tempo of the prose as you read. See how he uses adjectives, unpunctuated, to maintain a constant flow of impressions: Dean is “trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent — a sideburned hero of the snowy West” (p. 2). He wants you to pause and take in the qualities one by one.
Marylou, on the other hand, has “smoky blue country eyes fixed in a wide stare because she was in an evil gray New York pad that she’d heard about back West, and waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room” (p. 2). He wants you to take her in quickly, and he gives her mysterious qualities, both physical and suggestive. It’s not that Kerouac forgot how to type commas between adjectives — these sentences are in the same paragraph. He paces your reading with punctuation quite masterfully throughout the novel.
In section three of Part One, Sal is rejuvenated by bop in Chicago. As you read, notice how often bop marks significant events in the rest of the book. Near the end of section ten of Part Two is a remarkable passage of verbal bop, a single stunning sentence. Read it aloud and hear the jazz in his transcendent moment, a dizzying solo:
“And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven.” (p. 173)
Now read it again, aloud, faster. If you dare.
One of the most amazing jazz passages in the novel is too long to quote here. In two remarkable sentences, Kerouac encapsulates the history of jazz, beginning with Louis Armstrong and ending with Charlie “Bird” Parker. Watch for it. A hint: again, the setting is Chicago.
So the influence of jazz permeates the novel, from the actual jazz in the bars that keep Dean and Sal shouting, “Go! Go! Go!” to the sentences that read like tenor solos. He recreates a vocal performance in lavish detail, and he punctuates his own sentences as if they were riffs.
Juxtapositions: Permanence and Motion
In the course of the novel, Kerouac names, validates, and sanctifies the need to move. On the Road is all about motion, but moving needs a little contrast in order to seem real. You have to feel the wind of the Wild West in your hair to know you’re going somewhere. As you read, notice how everything is in constant motion, and Dean is usually the catalyst of frenetic, hard-driving motion. Speed is important; he speaks and drives rapidly, heedless of the condition of the vehicle. Very few of the heroes in the book stand still for very long at all. They go till they’re past exhaustion, sleep a little, then go flat-out again. Early in the novel, Shelton becomes a curse-word because Sal gets stuck there for a few hours. His contempt for being still is palpable; the exhilaration of speed is king.
Many of the people he visits are “stuck” where they are — and they are portrayed differently from his friends who rack up frequent road miles. He leaves Terry, for example, because her life is fraught with a permanence he cannot bear. He goes coast to coast on a lark.
In connection with motion, notice how many times the words mad and madness appear in the novel. They are always associated with people on the move. The more reckless they are, the madder they are — and the novel glorifies the madness of the road.
Heroes
If you want to read about the hero journey in greater detail, an excellent source is Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. You will see that between the two major characters, the novel’s five parts cover every aspect of the monomythic journey.
The Mythical Quest
The end of the first section ends with a compelling sentence, which establishes once and for all the bigger-than-life, archetypal nature of the novel: “Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” Doesn’t this remind you of the search for the Holy Grail? Aren’t these haphazard journeys contemporary pilgrimages? To bars as shrines, to jazz clubs as temples, led by prophets who have so often been portrayed as madmen?
Recall that John Clellon Holmes’ primary observation in the first article about the Beat Generation underscored that the Beat Generation was seeking something spiritual — that a religious quest was going on in a new form. What is a road trip but a quest, an instructive, spontaneous, maddening, joyous journey that expands your sense of your outer and inner worlds?
In keeping with the notion of the spiritual quest, there is a great deal of religious imagery in the novel. The pearl is the pearl of great price, the boon, the gift, the wisdom. As you read the rest of the novel, see if you think Sal is handed the pearl.
Also notice as you read that the novel contains many of the elements of the archetypal hero journey: a character is separated from life as he or she knew it, is taken into a new world under the tutelage of a guide or sage, and after a series of lessons and adventures the hero eventually returns (usually reluctantly) to his or her community with a gift that will benefit the community. On the Road, however, gives a twist to the notion. Surely Dean Moriarty is the guide who escorts Sal through worlds unknown to him, but there is no communal institution for either of them to return to, only the free-floating, spontaneous-forming gangs of the beat generation hooking up in Denver, San Francisco, and New York. The social institutions have broken down, and the road is the place where the characters typically experience sacred events. The car becomes a moving church, a vehicle in which heaven and earth occasionally converge, a house of the holy on wheels.
As you read the next parts, notice how Dean undergoes a transformation from beat to beatific. He becomes larger somehow in each part; eventually Sal characterizes him as an angel of the apocalypse — straight from the Biblical book of Revelation. He even takes on resonances of Jesus. He has disciples; Sal has “faith” in him.
Kerouac uses another technique throughout the novel to make everything seem bigger than life. I call it his “epic language,” the big poetic statements that stretch a little beyond the material events he transcribes. Here are a few examples:
“Dean, who had the tremendous energy of a new kind of American saint” (38).
“O sad American night!” (269)
“Dean’s California — wild, sweaty, important, the land of lonely and exiled and eccentric lovers come to forgather like birds, and the land where everybody somehow looked like broken-down, handsome, decadent movie actors” (168).
Deciding whether to have an affair with Marylou, as Dean wishes, Sal expands the moment beyond all reasonable proportion:
“It was three children of the earth trying to decide something in the night and having all the weight of past centuries ballooning in the dark before them” (132).
“What difference does it make after all? — anonymity in the world of men is better than fame in heaven, for what’s heaven? what’s earth? All in the mind” (246).
“the road is life” (212).
Look for similar statements in the novel; see how Kerouac is trying to make the novel go far beyond mere journalism with the names changed — he is trying to write the Great American Novel, so his language has to be huge at times.
Full Circle for What? Part One
Part One, as you know, covers Sal’s first trip to the West and back. What does he learn from making the loop?
When Sal leaves, the world is full of promise; he is sure he’ll be handed “the pearl.” Do you think he gets it in the first section? (And if he did, would there be any reason to write more?)
Notice that he heads West full of promise, as if he were accepting a sacred vocation, but in actuality he makes a false start and ends up taking the safe bus to Chicago, but later he laments having “broken up the purity of the journey” by Greyhounding it. He moves West in fits and starts, speeding to Cheyenne and encountering the pseudo-west, the flathead stereotypes from spaghetti westerns. He knows the difference. John Wayne is not his hero — Moriarty is.
At the nation’s midpoint, he loses all sense of identity, which is typical of a stage in the hero journey:
“I didn’t know who I was — I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, [. . .] really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t sacred; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon” (15).
He knows he is crossing a psychological boundary as well as a geographical landmark — there is a correspondence between the two.
Do you realize that we don’t even know his name until he gets to Denver — and then all we know is his first name? Clearly, he is forging his new identity as he moves West.
In the boomtown of Central City he has another realization about his new community:
They were like the man with the dungeon stone and the gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America, a new beat generation that I was finally joining (54).
Not until he reaches California is his whole name revealed, on the note Remi left for him: “SAL PARADISE” (61). Do you see any symbolism in his name?
Disenchantment is part of the archetypal hero quest. Sal experiences it in a moment of clarity:
How disastrous all this was compared to what I’d written him from Paterson, planning my red line Route 6 across America. Here I was at the end of America — no more land — and now there was nowhere to go but back (77).
Not so glamorous. Now the East starts looking “holy” (79).
Returning, he discovers that the East is not devoid of wilderness, and he concludes:
Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life? I had my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too (107).
But he never settles his accounts on paper, where the reader can see them.
Finally, Dean Moriarty scarcely appears in Part One, yet somehow he is its central figure, more conspicuous for his absence — and larger than life because his life isn’t shown directly while his enormous character is established through constant reference. Just as Sal kept missing the essence of the journey his first time out, he keeps missing Dean. There are more lessons and adventures waiting for him with his guide — the self-guided trip was not enough, and it never is in the mythic quest. Everyone needs a Zen Master. Luke Skywalker couldn’t become a Jedi without Yoda and Obi Wan Kenobi, after all. Think of how many other stories are based on an initiate following a mythical, mystical guide.
Assignment: On the Road
Finish On the Road.
