The draft the Kerouac used was on long scroll without formatting or paragraph breaks. I mentioned the jazz influence and Kerouac apparently used the scroll in this way to mimic improvisational jazz.
Sometimes the scroll can be seen on display - see photo below: All in all a very interesting book with very interesting characters and a very interesting history. Recommended to Anu by: that one person who compared this to The Catcher in the Rye.
Shelves: confused , classics , psychological-ish , drama-drama-drama , fucking-cheater , awful-male-characters , loathing-unadulterated-loathing , it-s-my-life , they-call-it-literary-fiction , tries-too-hard. Why is this a beloved book?
I read it for the second time because I thought I was too young to have understood it when I read it the first time. Well, turns out the book is still not good, and Jack Kerouac is still an asshole. For the past three days, I've been opening this edit box and closing it. Because honestly, I couldn't bear the thought of going through my notes, my notes filled with Kerouac's insipid, yet simultaneously aggravating thoughts.
I mean, I did read this twice! Two whole times. That's a lot of hours I'll never get back. Nevertheless, I stopped procrastinating, and decided that like ripping a band aid, it's best I get done with this as quickly as possible. Because after this, I'm never touching this book again. Fuck this book. There are books that I dislike because of the language. There are books that I dislike because they're too cheesy. There's books that I think are too good or too bad to be true and so I dislike them too.
Then there are books like this that I dislike, because seriously, what the fuck was the writer thinking? It reads like nothing more than an ode to his smarts, his friends' smarts, and their collective "intellectual and sexual prowess". I really don't like stereotypes. I try consciously to not stereotype. But this book could only and only have been written by a White, heterosexual male. Actually, make that American, White, heterosexual male. I mean, anyone who says that the millennial generation is self-obsessed should be asked to read this book.
Never have I read a book so complacent, so self-centered. Honestly, no one thinks Sal Jack and his friends are the pinnacle of intellectual evolution more than Sal and his friends. What makes it worse is Sal's constant undermining of his own intelligence, which very plainly looks like he's trying to talk about how smart he is without sounding like an, pardon my French, utter cunt.
Emphasis on "trying", because man alive, does he fail miserably at it. It could've been funny, maybe even a little charming. But Kerouac all spends his time trying to build up this aura of intellect, only for it collapse on itself inelegantly.
How anyone could idolise Dean Moriarty is beyond me. He is nothing more than a self-serving egomaniac and nymphomaniac who would probably pimp out his mother for a bottle of whiskey and a pack of smokes. The problem is, I've actually met people who're as bad, and the end result is nowhere as pretty as it is in this book. Don't even get me started on the portrayal of the female characters in this book. Because there is no "portrayal".
Despite his claims of having been with more women than I can count on my fingers, Sal's understanding of women is painfully pedestrian. On reading the description of the women in this book, I can only conclude that these characters were written by an alien ghost-writer who had a very vague idea of what women actually were.
They are reduced to caricatures of what someone else must have described as "women" to the writer. They're either whores or prudes. Easy or difficult. Hot or fat. In Sal, and in fact, his friends' eyes, women exist to satisfy their sexual needs. Worse still, women are okay with being reduced to mere sexual objects.
Never have I seen a man so tone-deaf about what women are since I say in many books that it is me, and not the book. Here, it is the book. The combination of smug intellectual superiority, and utter and total disregard for anyone who isn't White, heterosexual, or male make this book truly one of the worst I've read. There is the unnecessary glorification of criminal acts, of ruffians, of drugs, of addiction, of sex; gratuitous idolisation of people one really shouldn't be idolsing.
Kerouac perhaps pulled off perhaps the world's greatest literary scam in getting this book published. It isn't great in any way. I don't even think it is truly representative of the Beat Culture. Kerouac should've just stuck to naming that generation the Beat Generation and left the writing to his friends.
That is truly a better contribution to literature than this awful book. Considering this book a Great American Novel would be trivialising the contribution of America to the world of literature. View all 28 comments. Sep 25, Paul Bryant rated it really liked it Shelves: novels , autobiographical-novels.
You couldn't pay me enough to re-read this baby now. Kerouac took over from Steinbeck as the guy I had to read everything by when I was a young person. Steinbeck himself took over from Ray Bradbury.
All three American males with a sentimental streak as wide as the Rio Grande. Whole thing nearly turned me into a weepy hitchhiker who plays saxophone while he waits for a ride, then gets abducted by aliens who are these very kind blue glo You couldn't pay me enough to re-read this baby now.
Apr 15, J-Sin rated it did not like it. Pardon me while I write a scathing review for this book in the style of Kerouac, the Rambler. I really don't understand why this book is considered a classic. I think of it as nothing more than a diary written by a man who was soused all of the time and whose brain could not understand structure and the unwritten rules of writing.
It's incoherent, rambles on for days, and the "style" is distracting and annoying enough that reading even a page makes me yearn to kick somebody's puppy. And I like pu Pardon me while I write a scathing review for this book in the style of Kerouac, the Rambler. And I like puppies. But I don't like Kerouac at all and my dislike of his work makes me want to strike infant canines with the toe of my size 13 Nikes.
Maybe I'll write an entire book with no formatting and make it equally as boring. Yes, that's what I'll do. I'll write a book about nothing really. It will be one giant meandering paragraph with more pages than a David Foster Wallace novel about lots of Jest. Just thoughts about things like peanut butter, soap liquid and bar , peacocks pretty bird, you cannot fly , Darwinism, toilet paper 2 and 3 ply , Jesus, telephones, french fries, 25 pound paper, paperweights, weightlifters, jeans only blue , Kerouac fans as if they exist.
I think it's become fashionable to claim to be a Kerouac fan even though the fans' faux-understanding is nothing more than an absurdity.
Yeah, I said it - this book sucks. A lot. More than you could possibly fathom. May 06, Lostinanovel rated it really liked it. I personally can't stand the characters. They cover up irresponsibility and real hurt to people in the guise of being artists.
However, I do think there is more to this story. Sure, they are jerks and they are bums and they are full of a lot of BS but as the book progresses, it becomes clear that they know it. These guys are also WW2 vets, and very dissimilar to the hippies who follow them, they do not have any anti-American or anti-establishment feelings.
Also, they show a deep remorse and guilt I personally can't stand the characters. Also, they show a deep remorse and guilt over their actions. There is a shame, because they recognize what jerks they are. After several weeks of living with the mexican girl and her son, the narrator deserts her and he knows that he'll never live up to his promise to come back.
He hates himself for this but it doesn't stop him. While he so desperately seeks to squeeze the wonder out of life, he lets everything really beautiful-such as love with a woman or any real human relationships slip from his careless grasp. The narrator as more of a terribly sad man, not just a happy-go-lucky thrill seker. I do wonder about the real life Dean Moriarty.
Something about that guy really insprired the artisits around him. As for the writing, it is beautiful and I think some of the best writing ever done about America.
Googgle " On the Road Quotes" and reread a few of those. Its beautiful stuff. View all 3 comments. I read this book when I was 20 and I loved it, it spoke like Truth to my Heart, and every summer I and one or some of my increasingly hairy friends got on the road West, to the Rockies, to the Grand Tetons, to backpack and climb and breathe in for a time the pure air of the West.
Freedom, man! Back to Nature, one with Nature. At its best the writing was a celebration of all that is good in life, of love, of intoxications and lusts of various kinds. On the road! At 30 I read this book when I was 20 and I loved it, it spoke like Truth to my Heart, and every summer I and one or some of my increasingly hairy friends got on the road West, to the Rockies, to the Grand Tetons, to backpack and climb and breathe in for a time the pure air of the West.
At 30 I read it again to see if it was still vibrant and relevant and happy to be all alive. I was looking for a touchstone, spinning out of control, recently divorced, directionless, had bought what I thought was, for no clear reason a hot car, spent money I didn't have on a cool stereo system, started to live and drink and drive faster and faster.
I had been teaching at that point eight years; My life was in a crisis of my own making. I was deeply disappointed in myself as what I read in the writing not only didn't reinforce my bad choices but reflected on my own excesses and mistakes and sadness; I found the writing turgid, narcissistic, badly edited, somewhat misogynist, drunken wastrel prose, though I saw better this time in it the deep sadness underlying the wild surface. I thought it was writing of a certain time in your life, but when you grow up you leave those childish things behind.
I tried to get my life together and went to grad school. On the road, eh. I had found it in some ways juvenile and about selfish individualism this time, mine and his. At 60 I am in my 38th year of teaching, now in my happy third marriage, with five kids I feel I am lucky to have and be able to support who all still love me. I am happy to be alive and healthy.
I survived some very rocky years when much worse might have ensued. So when I took a road trip with my friend George to see my friend Corey in Boston and see Fenway Park, a bucket list item, we had a blast notwithstanding a poem I wrote about it that makes fun of all the high expectations amidst all the rain. Loved the trip. We visited Kerouac's gravesite in Lowell and in the mist of the day hovered over George's IPhone to listen to Kerouac's own voice reading his words from "October in the Railroad Earth.
The prose I find on my third reading is poetic, deeply committed to working class and democratic values, and a celebration of life. When I get home I start to reread all the Kerouac I still have in the house, including On the Road, which I find I love like an old friend I have had been "on the outs" with, as my Dad used to say. We are pals again, we love being on the road! Romantic, just what I need in this phase of my life, connecting passionate language to life.
It's a little uneven, it's not always really great language or storytelling, it feels sometimes like a young man's diary, but I also like that for the immediacy of that, too, and it is important to me for the joy and sadness in it. Not because it is one of the greatest books of all time for all people. It's a "boy book" in what are sometimes painful ways to read, because the women always seem peripheral to the men. Dec 09, Jon Nakapalau rated it it was amazing Shelves: favorites , pop-culture , classics , travel.
This book takes me back to that once in a lifetime summer when you sit with your friends and say "we should just hit the road and let it take us anywhere. Jack took that road; and I traveled with him in the spirit of that summer lo This book takes me back to that once in a lifetime summer when you sit with your friends and say "we should just hit the road and let it take us anywhere.
Jack took that road; and I traveled with him in the spirit of that summer long ago. View all 5 comments. Nov 11, Trevor I sometimes get notified of comments rated it really liked it Shelves: literature.
And often those boundaries are pretty well fixed by the covers of the book that I find them in. Just the same, I already know that the bad driving would force my eyelids open just as surely as if matchsticks had been propped in there under the lashes.
Yes, yes, I would find the driving the most difficult thing to deal with. Shit no. Still, this novel rings out and over and through a million imitations.
This is a book affected by the rhythms of Jazz and it shows in virtually every sentence. It is hard to read this book without a soundtrack of Dizzy Gillespie or Thelonious Monk or maybe even the Lady herself humming in your head, though maybe not singing, maybe just vamping one-handed on some just out-of-tune upright piano while the bass man taps his stings half-heartedly, half-heartedly and no more. Come here and find me a blindman for this piano.
Christ, maybe even as residue sound from the keystrokes tapping against the paper scrunched up in an old manual typewriter. The crazed brothel scene near the end with the young Latin American girls plastered and passed out and violated in expectation of little more than enough money to buy a pack of cigarettes — even if, perhaps, they received much more than that, you know, in the end, even if no one seemed to know how much was actually spent. It was clear from the beginning how much would be taken from all of these all-too-young little angels.
Yes, that was all too much for my all too dull and far too prudish categorical imperatives. I struggled and I felt for those young girls and for what was being taken from them for a fist full of paper worth virtually nothing. There was lots of that — lots of the sorts of things that good sons and good employees and good fathers struggle up against and fight up against and find just all too confronting.
I mean that for sure. Listen to that. That trilling on the piano. The trill is to remind you that every drink you have between now and then is going to cost you double as you run for that open door, the one with the hand sticking out of the dark and with someone you think you know calling out your name. But think nothing of it now, my friend, put it right out of your mind. The same brown eyes she used to furtively check you over with — what? Has that been for the third time now?
For sure. Do you understand what I saying to you? Kerouac evokes the mythography of American pioneers and lonesome cowboys 'this road,' I told him, 'is also the route of old American outlaws' even as Sal, 2nd read, July Re-reading this I was far more conscious of a growing sense of disillusion in Sal Paradise as he contemplates Dean Moriarty, the epitome of beat: part holy-man, part con-man, the other side of his free-living, restless life is his lack of reliability which Sal experiences first hand when he's sick and abandoned in Mexico.
Kerouac evokes the mythography of American pioneers and lonesome cowboys 'this road,' I told him, 'is also the route of old American outlaws' even as Sal, and even Dean, seem to yearn for some kind of home that always evades them: 'so I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for'.
And Kerouac's prose is astounding. But no matter, the road is life. A blazing, youthful book, packed with energy and sadness, rebellion and disaffection: don't read this if you're looking for a plot or some kind of linear storytelling, read it for the evocation of mood, and Kerouac's 'spontaneous writing' that fizzes with vigour and force. Set in and based around 4 road trips across the US, Kerouac's alter ego, Sal Paradise, follows his idol Dean Moriarty in an odyssey of wildness: drink, drugs, hook-ups, jazz.
The boy-men fall in love again and again, abandoning women across the country because this is a masculine bromance and there's no real place for girls. Only during the 3rd and 4th trips, a darker element seeps in: Sal realises that Moriarty is a 'holy con-man' and that the other side of freedom is a rootlessness that cuts deep - one of the things that Dean Moriarty is searching for is his lost father, and he duplicates and multiplies that loss as he gets girls pregnant then leaves them, sprinkling fatherless children across the country.
There are moments when we want to reach into the book and shake some sense into Sal, particularly when he sentimentalises what it might mean to be black in s America: 'I was only myself The casual misogyny and homophobia of the time also have a place here as, apparently, rejection of stifling social conventions only goes so far With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.
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