So this one time, at office, I was getting bored. So I downloaded the pdf version of Kerouac's On The Road again. Was reading it after almost two years. Since college.
Till date it happens to be his most talked about novel . Ramblings inspired by the drug-fueled cross-country car rides that Kerouac made with Neal Cassidy (1926-1968). Since then it has become the face of 'beat prose' as well. I somewhere read that when his friends did not like On the Road, Kerouac started to write inserts to patch up the work. These grew into a new book. Although Ginsberg considered it a "holy mess", he did not change its rambling style and discontinuous structure which had the improvisational quality of jazz.
Sal Paradise is a young writer who life takes a wild course as he meets Dean Moriarty, a crazy young man, previously convicted of several crimes including car theft. Dean comes to Sal to learn how to write. Together they go drifting around America, and testing the limits of the American Dream. Through rural wilderness, sleepy small towns, urban jungles, endless deserts-all linked by the road, they go looking for a vent for their expression and find freedom. Often finding pleasure in sex, drugs, and jazz.
Sal Paradise says: "life is holy and every moment is precious", which explains why Dean" seemed to be doing everything at the same time". To describe the likes of Dean, Kerouac writes," It's in prison that you promise yourself the right to live." And probably we all relate to it someway or the other. Especially if we have a bad habit of being optimistic about things.
Sal loves his homeland, especially the grandeur of its landscape, the variety of its people. But it is changing, and he is disappointed by the change at times, like when he tries to sit on the banks of the Mississippi River and is stymied by a chain-link fence. There seem to be two sides to everything. The vast emptiness of the American West can either fill the spirit or be the epitome of loneliness. On one side is Terry, the pretty Hispanic worker Sal spends a couple weeks with in California, and on the other are the suburban teenagers who shout at her from their cars. There is Dean, who is the spirit of the West, and the suspicious policemen with power who eternally pursue him. Sal's dreams of America are both realized and parodied, as in his first trip to the West, when he is happy to see real cowboys, but also sees the hokey Wild West festival in Cheyenne, and the tourist town of Central City. All the gold that was mined out of Central City is being returned to it in the form of tourist dollars. It is an America which is still plagued by class and racial divides, but changing rapidly.
"On the Road" is about experience; it tells tales of mad and the best minds of a generation destroyed by such madness evoking only feelings of confusion.
ON THE ROAD races like a mad man desperately looking for his something that he still can't define. A mad man looking to break away from servitude, a man who lives in all of us in some form or the other.
