Kicks, Kerouac And The Beat Generation: Review Of On The Road

He unveils this narrative in a stream of consciousness style rambling that exacerbates their frenetic lifestyle punctuated by words that every often are utterly chaotic for the brain to digest, keeping the readers in their Hudson Commodore, and letting us experience what it was like living as a broke beat amidst post World War 2 in America where drugs, sex, hitchhiking and bebop jazz flourished across a span of 280 pages. On the Road is not a complex novel at all and can be easily read and digested by even those who are novice to the art of absorbing fiction. In a 1968 interview with William F. Buckley Jr., Kerouac stated that this novel was about two Catholic buddies roaming across the country and that they found them. But to be honest, it’s a lot more than that.

Of course, it takes a swim through a few pages to actually enter into the Benzedrine fueled headspace of its lead narrator, Sal. He’s freshly out of a divorce, but that’s not his concern. He is only concerned about his friend Dean (Neal Cassidy in real life), a carefree adventurer and a womaniser who always wants to …No, always escapes his adult responsibilities in search of finding himself. “With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road,” narrates Sal in the opening page. He’s the main catalyst who pursues the protagonist to constantly take a trip.

The entire novel carries on like a typical Road movie (of course that’s what the title is selling right?) and begins with his first ever solo journey in the year 1947, where he sets off to travel from the East Coast to the West with San Francisco as the final destination, not in his own vehicle but rather confidently through buses and hitchhiking with just 50$ in his pocket lent from his aunt. The text entirely talks about what they are doing and what they do. He did that, I did this kind of stuff all the time. They’re ready to face whatever these strange, aimless excursions throw at their face. Some of the fun bits here are the short flings between Sal and a Mexican woman named Terry, whom he meets while on his way to Los Angeles. The read is seamless and often rewarding, with Kerouac inducing picturesque prose like “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? It’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies…”, and that’s enough poetic to make us hold onto it till the last page finishes.

World War 2 was a very distressing time in history indeed, and in a historical context, the beats or the men in this world don’t know what’s going to happen in the future because of a gruesome recent past. So they’re all in it, enjoying the heck out of their souls to delirious states of ecstasy, whether it’s writing poetry on heroin or swaying over to the jazzy tunes of Charlie Parker’s ornithology, it is the moment that they want to be in. But there are also some nasty costs associated with it. Sal is ignorant about everything.

They want to do whatever they want to devour those kicks, whether it’s treating friends badly or blatantly lying to women just to make love to them; he’s got you all covered in it. And Dean is the main character that we need to be talking about. He’s the kind of friend one always dreams of: wild, rebellious, energetic and imprudent. Sal says that Dean is always fascinated with travelling because he was allegedly born to his parents while they were on the road. To Sal, he views Dean as this mysterious and charismatic force in the same lens as how Nick Carraway is fascinated with Jay Gatsby. Abandoning is one special skill that we all can learn from Dean.

He’s loathed in his self-desires and in attaining that meaningless meaning which is to him attained from driving rashly, drinking until he passes out and hunting after young girls. The sections where he abandons his three wives are a bit excruciating to read and always puts on a red flag in our subconscious. Initially,he fools around with his teenage wife, Mary Lou, to whom, even after he annuls their marriage, he will again return just to get that pleasure while cheating on his pregnant second wife, Camille. Women don’t have much of a voice in Kerouac’s narrative. They’re just viewed as someone who’s fun until they start to disobey their ideologies.

Aside from women, Dean is also notorious for abandoning the protagonist in two instances, But we get to wonder why is this fella so fascinated with such an unlikeable persona, is there any other motif behind it to actually adore these actions who always says ‘Whee!’ and ‘Whoo!’ before he rubs his belly and tries to spoil himself and the people in his surroundings as much as possible. But spoiling out is the fun part for them too, as they always chased behind getting those Kicks. Even the novel justifies this with one instance from a character named Galatea, to whom Dean’s friend Ed Dunkel marries only by seeing her finances. She says, “…You have absolutely no regard for anybody but yourself and your damned kicks. All you think about is what’s hanging between your legs and how much money or fun you can get out of people, and then you just throw aside…”, and that is basically the message that we all wanted to hear from this magnum opus.

This novel strictly tries not to be didactic at all—it doesn’t want to teach us any morals. Maybe that’s how it was meant to be under the disguise of “Living in the moment”. But the payoff to Dean’s betrayal of Sal is on a satisfactory note, where there’s a change indicated in his character. It’s when Sal sets off to watch a Duke Ellington concert with his girlfriend and friend Remi Bonoceur, where Dean requests him to drop off on 40th avenue, but Remi rejects it. And when Sal’s girlfriend raises about this, he replies that Dean will be Alright.

But once we reach the end, we come to a realisation that nobody might’ve experienced traversing through the terrain of America as much as Kerouac did. There are some amazing instances where we get to reflect on our personal road-trips that we’ve been a part of in the past and acts an instant reminder that we need to again pack our bags and instantly set foot on the tarmac. On another level, the narrative also feels like a personalised message from your close friend because there are instances where Kerouac even broke the fourth wall and mentions his creative difficulties in finishing this piece of literature within the novel. Also, his tastes in Jazz music are one confident fact that nobody should turn a blind eye to.

Ever since its release, this novel always stood out as a culturally altering piece of counter cultural tour de force on an entire generation, and most importantly had a profound impact on the 60’s hippie movement who has worshipped it as much as the holy bible, that it became one of the major driving forces for them to initiate the happening of summer of love. And 70 years later, even though the prose doesn’t feel too out of reach and fresh as it was written on a scroll, it has some elements which are debatable and make us reflect on a different viewpoint in the present.

This article is authored by Yoga Aditya, interning at Deccan Chronicle, Secunderabad.