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On the Road
In
1957, just when affluent, suburban America had reached its zenith,
Kerouac saw his autobiographical novel published and obtained an
enormous success. In fact, the book became a kind of "Bible" for young
people,who rejected America’s values, consumerism,
puritanism and individualism.
Back in 1951,
in only twenty days, in an incredible burst of creative
energy, Kerouac
had typed On the Road on a
120-foot teletypewriter paper roll (see picture, page 5). He was inspired
by the style of William Burroughs, but also by James Joyce, Thomas
Wolfe , Theodore Dreiser , Anthony
Trollope , and the French author
Ferdinand Céline .
On the Road [F1] lacks a central
plot, since its structure is episodic, but three
structural elements
give it cohesion:
1. the theme
of the journey,
symbol of the escape from the city and from one's own past;
2. the
narrator Sal Paradise,
who stands for the author himself;
3. the same
group of
friends experiencing
chronic restlessness and
uneasiness, expressed in a desire to "get going" and "keep moving".
The hero of the book is Dean Moriarty, a
fictionalized Neal Cassady,
who lives for "kicks", as he
describes moments of intense pleasure and
experience, free from all social restraints. Dean (as the "Archetypal
American Man") symbolizes the
desperate attempt of the post-war generation to overcome a sense of
uselessness, void and fear, through a sort of escapism.
During their journey, on the
streets of America, Dean and Sal Paradise
feel wild and free, "leaving
confusion and nonsense behind, and performing [their] one and noble
function of the time, move": Kerouac describes the music they
listen to, the
people they meet and the details of their everyday life with an
enthousiastic spontaneous prose.
Following the rules he had devised for
his own writing since the early years of his career, the author
introduced slang and colloquial words, simplified punctuation and
syntactical rules, and followed free mental associations: so, an
absolute lack of interest in sophisticated language characterizes the
novel.
The main characters of the book
(and of most of his other novels, too) are clearly identifiable friends
of the author's: under the pseudonym of Carlo Marx we easily recognize Allen Ginsberg,
for example; Old Bull Lee is William Burroughs; Tom Saybrook is writer John Clellon Holmes; Neal
Cassady's first wife Luanne is Marylou.
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