Places Discussed
*Denver
*Denver. Colorado’s capital and largest city. In Denver, Sal ventures to the apartment of Carlo Marx, which is in a brick boardinghouse near a church. To get to Carlo’s door, he must walk down an alley, descend stairs, open an old door, and pass through a cellar. Within the apartment, the walls are damp, and the scant furnishings include a candle, a bed, and a homemade icon. A meeting between Carlo and Dean Moriarity sets off the events in Colorado, and Sal soon finds himself embarked on a trip to Central City, where a performance of an opera is staged in a renovated opera house. The day starts well when an empty miner’s shack becomes available, and Sal and his friends dress formally for the performance. Later, back at the shack, they throw a party. When troublesome young visitors ruin the party, Sal and his friends go to the local bars, where they get drunk and begin shouting. Unfortunately, drunkenness leads to fights in the bars, but Sal and his friends escape before the violence escalates. At the shack, the friends cannot sleep well on the dusty bed. Breakfast is stale beer. In the car, the descent to Denver is depressing.
*Southern California
*Southern California. Upon his arrival in Los Angeles, Sal declares that Los Angeles is the loneliest city in America. Traveling with Terry, his Mexican lover, Sal walks down a main street, where there is a carnival atmosphere. Short of funds and finding no employment, Sal and Terry journey to Bakersfield to earn money by picking grapes. Finally, near Sabinal, they find work as cotton pickers. They rent a tent for a dollar, and though Sal’s wages provide only for day-to-day subsistence, Sal is wonderfully in love and feels happy that he is living off the earth, as he always dreamed he would be. Nevertheless, the chill of October arrives, and Sal has the restless desire to leave. Sal and Terry promise to meet in New York, but each knows the meeting will never come to pass. Getting a ride to Los Angeles, Sal stops at Columbia Pictures, where his rejected manuscript awaits him. Instead of embarking on a Hollywood career, Sal finds himself making baloney sandwiches in a parking lot, waiting for the departure of his bus.
*New Orleans
*New Orleans. Louisiana’s largest and most cosmopolitan city. As Dean, Sal, and others drive along, they are thrilled to hear jazz playing on the radio. New Orleans appears ahead of them, and they anticipate the excitement of the city. The women on the streets are stunningly beautiful. On the ferry across the Mississippi River, Sal appreciates the great American river.
*Algiers
*Algiers. District of New Orleans. Arriving in Algiers, the traveling band finds the dilapidated house of Old Bull Lee. Sal and Dean hope to visit exciting bars in New Orleans, but Bull insists that the bars are all dreary and takes his friends to the dullest places. Later, when Sal wants to look at the Mississippi, he finds that a fence blocks his view. As days go by, Bull reveals his eccentricities and distrust of bureaucracy, and they begin to weary of one another’s company. Finally, in the dusky light, Dean, Marylou, and Sal get in their car and head to California.
*Mexico
*Mexico. Sal, Dean, and Stan drive into Mexico, and Sal takes the wheel. He notices the surrounding jungle and the road that rises into the mountains. In Gregoria, a young Mexican named Victor approaches and provides marijuana and prostitutes. A wild night of intoxication, sex, music, and dancing ensues, making Sal feel that...
(This entire section contains 764 words.)
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he is experiencing the end of the world. Nevertheless, as soon as Sal and Dean leave Gregoria, the road slopes downward.
The night is dark and steamy hot, with bugs swarming and biting. On the map, the men see that they have crossed the Tropic of Cancer. Caked with dead bugs and stinking in their sweaty shirts, they proceed to Ciudad Mante. After refueling there, Sal, Dean, and Stan begin another ascent. At an elevation of more than one mile, they discover a tiny thatched hut. They meet some native children, whose eyes are like those of the Virgin Mary. Sal is especially impressed that these native people are oblivious to atomic weaponry and its power to destroy everything. Their old Ford rolls on, and soon the men are immersed in the frantic pace of Mexico City. Sal becomes delirious after contracting dysentery, and Dean, having secured his Mexican divorce papers, abandons Sal to make his return trip.
Historical Context
Post-World War II America
The concluding phase of World War II marked the dawn of the atomic era. The United States deployed atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, compelling Japan to surrender. Emerging from the devastation of the war, the United States positioned itself as the leader of the Western world. Veterans returned to their families, homes, education, and jobs. The nation was on the brink of becoming one of the most formidable economic powers in history. Nonetheless, growing anxiety over the atomic bomb and the onset of the Cold War with the Soviet Union loomed large.
On March 5, 1946, Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain, delivered a speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. In his address, he proclaimed: "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." Churchill cautioned that the United States and its allies needed to be vigilant against Soviet expansionism. His warning seemed prophetic when, in June 1948, the Soviet Union initiated the Berlin blockade, severing Berlin's access to the West. In response, the United States launched a massive airlift to supply Berlin with food and fuel. Tensions escalated further in August 1949 when the Soviet Union detonated its first atomic bomb. These events in the late 1940s set the stage for the anti-communist witch-hunts led by Senator Joseph McCarthy.
On the Road is not a political novel, yet it is difficult to imagine that Kerouac was untouched by the prevailing atmosphere in America at the time. The atrocities of the war, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the rising tide of intolerance in the United States must have affronted his sensibilities. These circumstances likely propelled him further away from the values of the society he inhabited. Certain passages in the novel hint at Kerouac's concerns, such as when Old Bull Lee discusses with Sal the potential for humanity to one day communicate with the deceased:
When a man dies, he undergoes a mutation in his brain that we know nothing about now but which will be very clear someday if scientists get on the ball. The bastards right now are only interested in seeing if they can blow up the world.
This passage illustrates that even characters living on the fringes of "respectable" society cannot escape the looming threat of the bomb.
The Beat Generation
In his book, The Birth of the Beat Generation, Steven Watson writes:
In its strictest sense, the Beat Generation refers solely to William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Herbert Huncke, with Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky joining slightly later. In a broader context, the term encompasses many innovative poets linked to San Francisco, Black Mountain College, and New York's Downtown scene. This expansive definition highlights a collective interest in spiritual liberation, evident in their candid personal content and free-form expression in both verse and prose, leading to admiration for avant-garde writers like Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams.
Ann Charters, the editor of The Portable Beat Reader, notes that the term "beat" was "primarily used after World War II by jazz musicians and hustlers as a slang term meaning down and out, or poor and exhausted." The street usage of the word was introduced to Kerouac by Herbert Huncke, a Times Square hustler and drug addict. Kerouac was fascinated by what he perceived as the word's mysterious and elusive quality. During a later conversation with his friend, writer John Clellon Holmes, Kerouac coined a phrase that encapsulated the vision he shared with Ginsberg, Burroughs, and others. Charters writes:
As Holmes recollected the conversation, Kerouac said, "It's a kind of furtiveness… Like we were a generation of furtives. You know, with an inner knowledge that there's no use flaunting on that level, the level of the 'public,' a kind of beatness—I mean, being right down to it, to ourselves, because we all really know where we are—and a weariness with all the forms, all the conventions of the world… So I guess you might say we're a beat generation."
Holmes later wrote an essay for The New York Times titled "This Is the Beat Generation," attempting to describe the societal disaffiliation felt by many young people like Kerouac in post-World War II America. However, it wasn't until Kerouac published On the Road in 1957, shortly after Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems, that the Beat Generation and the Beat literary movement truly captured American public interest. There was some public backlash; for instance, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen mockingly coined the term "beatniks" to describe the West Coast youth involved in the movement. In response, Kerouac explained that "beat" also had a deeper spiritual meaning, akin to "beatific." Nevertheless, Kerouac himself had little patience for the "hipsters" with their goatees and berets, viewing many who adopted the Beat label as poseurs, even conformists. In the sixties, Kerouac distanced himself from the "beatniks" as they evolved into "hippies."
Literary Style
Setting
The characters in On the Road journey through numerous cities across the United States and Mexico. Key sections of the novel unfold in New York City, Denver, San Francisco, southern California, New Orleans, and Mexico. While Sal's frequent travels sometimes lend his descriptions a generic tone, many of his portrayals are exceptionally vivid. For instance, upon his initial arrival in Mexico City, he observes:
thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and long-lapeled jackets over bare chests walking along the main drag. Some were selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, while others knelt in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were filled with rubble and open sewers, with small doors leading to closet-sized bars embedded in adobe walls. You had to leap over a ditch to get your drink, where the ancient lake of the Aztecs lay at the bottom. Emerging from the bar, you pressed your back to the wall and edged your way back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo music blared everywhere. Hundreds of whores lined the dark, narrow streets, their sorrowful eyes gleaming at us in the night.
However, the primary setting of the novel is the roads of America. Sal hitchhikes with eccentrics, rides on flatbed trucks with cowboys, and lingers in bus stations with vagabonds. In part two, Sal and Dean spend most of their time driving across the southern United States in a rundown Hudson that Dean buys in San Francisco. Later, they traverse the western prairies in a Cadillac limousine obtained through a travel bureau. Thus, the novel's title is the most fitting description of its setting.
Roman à Clef
A roman à clef (French for "novel with a key") is a novel where the characters are real people with fictional names. On the Road is a thinly veiled account of Kerouac's life in the late 1940s. Sal Paradise serves as Kerouac's alter ego. Kerouac, a recently divorced writer, traveled back and forth across the country with a lively and charismatic drifter from Denver named Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty). Kerouac's friends included the wildly eccentric poet Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) and the decadent bohemian William Burroughs (Old Bull Lee). Al Hinkle (Ed Dunkel), Carolyn Cassady (Camille Moriarty), and Henri Cru (Remi Boncoeur) are just a few of the many other friends and acquaintances of Kerouac who appear in the novel.
Sal's journeys throughout the book mirror Kerouac's own real-life experiences. Just like Sal, Kerouac fell for a Mexican girl in southern California. Similarly, he had to escape Denver because a friend stole five cars in one night. Kerouac was left stranded on the streets of San Francisco and Mexico City by Cassady, whom he saw as a brother, paralleling how Dean abandons Sal. Both Kerouac and Sal end up disillusioned with their friends by the end of their stories. A biography of Kerouac reveals the "key" to understanding this novel.
Anti-hero
Dean Moriarty exemplifies the antihero in American literature. Unlike
traditional heroes, antiheroes lack traits like bravery, honesty, and
selflessness. Dean, despite being intelligent, likable, and bold, rejects
responsibility entirely, marking him as an anti-hero. He is a habitual thief
who continues stealing throughout the novel, despite spending much of his life
in reformatories. As a con man, he manipulates even his closest friends without
hesitation. He is a womanizer who simultaneously marries and plans
infidelities. Dean betrays friends without remorse, as seen when he abandons
Sal twice. Yet, Sal's sensitive portrayal keeps Dean a sympathetic
character.
"Spontaneous Prose"
Although Kerouac's later works were more experimental in style and narrative, On the Road, his second novel, was a breakthrough. He found his voice while writing it and began developing "spontaneous prose." At the request of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, he later wrote two short essays on his methods: "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose." Kerouac aspired to write like a great bop jazz musician, such as Charlie Parker, played his instrument, leading to the creation of "bop prosody." This technique emphasized improvisation, passion, and spontaneity, disregarding traditional grammar and punctuation. Several passages in On the Road showcase this method, with a poignant example being the final paragraph, an elegiac reflection on the end of the journey for Sal and Dean:
In America, as the sun sets and I sit on the old, broken-down river pier, I watch the endless skies over New Jersey. I feel the vast expanse of raw land stretching in a massive swell all the way to the West Coast. I think of the endless roads and the countless people dreaming within this vastness. In Iowa, I know that by now the children must be crying in the land where they are allowed to cry. Tonight, the stars will shine, and don't you know that God is PoohBear? The evening star will droop, shedding its dim sparkles over the prairie, just before complete night blesses the earth. Darkness will cover the rivers, embrace the peaks, and fold in the final shore. Nobody, nobody knows what will happen to anyone beyond the forlorn remnants of aging. I think of Dean Moriarty. I even think of Old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found. I think of Dean Moriarty.
This passage showcases Kerouac's technique. It is a single, long run-on sentence with a few pauses (much like a saxophone player taking a breath), filled with vivid, poetic imagery. Kerouac continued to employ these methods, sometimes with radical effects, in his later works.
Literary Techniques
Kerouac championed a writing style he termed "Spontaneous Prose," which was an eclectic mix of various influences. This approach drew partly from a technique called sketching, William Carlos Williams' idea of "concrete particulars," and W. B. Yeats's trance writing. By integrating elements he observed in improvisational jazz and abstract painting techniques, he sought to capture the tempo, language, and vitality of his Bohemian experiences. In On the Road, his goal was to create a prose rhythm that mirrored the intense experience of Neal Cassady's frenetic verbal agility and the exhilarating momentum of four high-speed cross-country car journeys.
Compare and Contrast
1946: The Nuremberg trials conclude with the conviction of fourteen Nazi war criminals.
1995: Several Serbian leaders are charged by the United Nations for war crimes in Bosnia. Further indictments are anticipated after Yugoslavian forces invade Kosovo in 1999, attempting to expel ethnic Albanians in another episode of "ethnic cleansing."
1947: The House Un-American Activities Committee initiates hearings and charges the "Hollywood Ten" with contempt, sparking a blacklist of alleged communist sympathizers during the "McCarthyism" era.
1999: Controversy arises when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards an honorary "Oscar" to director Elia Kazan. Known for directing classics like On the Waterfront and East of Eden, Kazan faced backlash for naming colleagues as communist sympathizers. Many in the audience abstain from applauding when he receives the award.
1948: The Soviet Union initiates the Berlin blockade, severing Berlin's connection to the West. The United States responds with a large-scale airlift to supply Berlin with food and fuel. The Berlin Wall is eventually erected, symbolizing the divide between Western freedom and Eastern totalitarianism.
1999: The Berlin Wall, which was dismantled in 1989, is now a mere memory. Germany reunifies in 1990 for the first time since World War II. The Soviet Union disintegrates, and its republics declare independence. Today, the United States and allies incorporate some of the former Soviet satellites into NATO. Russia's transition toward democracy causes economic turmoil, leading it to seek support from the United States and the global community.
1949: The American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute warn that smoking cigarettes may cause cancer.
1990s: The tobacco industry is compelled to settle numerous class-action lawsuits due to its liability for the adverse effects of its products on public health.
Literary Precedents
On the Road can be classified as a picaresque novel due to its episodic nature and the depiction of the roguish yet saintly character, Dean Moriarty. Its most immediate literary influences are the irreverent confessional works of Henry Miller and the intense, emotionally charged novels of Thomas Wolfe.
Just as Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926) captures the disillusionment of the generation lost after the Great War, On the Road articulates the ethos of the post-World War II "beat" generation. However, a significant difference lies in the characters' outlooks. Hemingway's characters are cynical expatriates, ensnared in the remnants of the old world, their situation hopeless as they are severed from the vibrant new world. In contrast, Kerouac's generation experiences an internal exile, alienated by the dehumanization of modern life yet still clutching to hopes for inspiration, spontaneous meaning, and transcendent revelations. Their journey may be endless, but the journey itself holds paramount importance.
Much of On the Road aligns with the Emerson-Thoreau-Whitman tradition, emphasizing the search for meaning in the present through tangible experiences and actions. Whitman, in particular, profoundly influences Kerouac's perspective on America and his resolve to create a new language to describe and capture his observations. Similar to Thoreau, Kerouac harbored a deep distrust of many aspects of Western Civilization, the concept of progress, and the spiritual arrogance and complacency of his time.
Media Adaptations
There are two different audiobook editions of On the Road. The first is an abridged version narrated by actor David Carradine, released by Penguin Audiobooks in 1993. The second is an unabridged edition, recorded in 1995 and narrated by Tom Parker.
Bibliography and Further Reading
Sources
Freeman Champney, "Beat-Up or Beatific?," The Antioch Review, Vol. XIX, No. 1, Spring 1959, pp. 114-21.
Ann Charters, "Introduction: Variations on a Generation," in The Portable Beat Reader, edited by Ann Charters, Penguin Books, 1992, pp. xvii, xix-xx.
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987.
David Dempsey, "In Pursuit of Kicks," The New York Times Book Review, September 8, 1957, p. 4.
Edmund Fuller, in Man in Modern Fiction: Some Minority Opinions on Contemporary Writing, Random House, 1958, p. 154.
Ralph Gleason, "Kerouac's Beat Generation," Saturday Review, Vol. XLI, January 11, 1958, p. 75.
Herbert Gold, "Hip, Cool, Beat—and Frantic," The Nation, Vol. 185, No. 16, November 16, 1957, pp. 349-55.
Hopkiss, Robert A. Jack Kerouac, Prophet of a New Romanticism. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.
Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Viking, 1957.
Jarvis, Charles E. Visions of Kerouac. Lowell, Massachusetts: Ithaca Press, 1973.
Dennis McNally, Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America, New York: Random House, 1979.
Gilbert Millstein, review in The New York Times, September 5, 1957, p. 27.
Gerald Nicosia, Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, New York: Grove Press, 1983.
Norman Podhoretz, "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," (1958) in his Doings and Undoings, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1964, pp. 143-58.
Thomas Parkinson, ed. A Casebook on the Beat. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1961.
Steven Watson, in The Birth of the Beat Generation, Pantheon Books, 1995, pp. 5, 256.
Regina Weinreich, The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
For Further Study
Lee Bartlett, "The Dionysian Vision of Jack Kerouac," in The Beats: Essays of Criticism, edited by Lee Bartlett, McFarland, 1981, pp. 115-23. Bartlett utilizes C. G. Jung's psychoanalytic theories to explore the connection Kerouac establishes between jazz musicians and Dionysian writers.
Jim Burns, "Kerouac and Jazz," in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. III, No. 2, Summer, 1983. Analyzes the jazz references and musicians mentioned in On the Road and other Kerouac works.
Carolyn Cassady, Off the Road: My Years with Kerouac, Cassady, and Ginsberg, New York, 1990. Memoirs of Neal Cassady's wife.
Ann Charters, Kerouac: A Biography, Straight Arrow Books, 1973. The first biography of Jack Kerouac.
Warren French, Jack Kerouac, Twayne, 1986. Examines the novels that form "The Duluoz Legend" as Kerouac's attempt to reshape his life into a literary saga comparable to James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus novels.
Barry Gifford and Lawrence Lee, Jack's Book, St. Martin's Press, 1978. An oral history featuring Kerouac and his friends.
John Clellon Holmes, "The Philosophy of the Beats," in Esquire Vol. 99, No. 6, June, 1983, pp. 158-67. Early analysis initially published in the February 1958 issue of Esquire, highlighting the spiritual quest's significance to the Beats.
Granville H. Jones, "Jack Kerouac and the American Conscience," in Lectures on Modern Novelists, edited by Arthur T. Broes, et. al., Books for Libraries Press, 1972, pp. 25-39. Defines the individualistic philosophy Kerouac promoted in his fiction and life as a uniquely American trait.
Jack Kerouac, Selected Letters 1940-1956, edited by Ann Charters, Viking, 1995. Annotated letters from Kerouac's early years before fame.
Gerald Nicosia's Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, published by Grove Press in 1983, is the most comprehensive biography of Kerouac. It also features a critical examination of his novels.
Bibliography
Cassady, Carolyn. Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg. New York: William Morrow, 1990. Background and chronology of On the Road from a woman’s point of view. See also her 1978 memoir Heartbeat: My Life with Jack and Neal.
Charters, Ann. Kerouac: A Biography. San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1973. First book by Charters, a tireless Kerouac scholar. Discusses On the Road’s biographical underpinnings and connections.
French, Warren. Jack Kerouac. Boston: Twayne, 1986. Two chapters analyzing On the Road from biographical and critical approaches.
Kerouac, Jack. Visions of Cody. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972. Contains notes, early drafts, and passages expurgated from On the Road.
Milewski, Robert J. Jack Kerouac: An Annotated Bibliography of Secondary Sources, 1944-1979. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1981. Exhaustive bibliography covering primary and secondary works, reviews, theses, dissertations, and related works. Includes a long discussion of On the Road with extensive citations and annotations.