Welcome to our book club discussion for August! As always, thank you to everyone who reached out to us with their thoughts, you will find a few featured below.
Also, we have come across this video of Kerouac himself reading the end of On The Road alongside a piano, we would really recommend you give it a watch.
Apart from that, we hope you enjoy reading our thoughts on this incredible novel. See you next month for our discussion on… Demian by Hermann Hesse.
August’s Book Club. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac crafted this novel – On The Road – so damn well. It is so deeply human and so very intimate, that for the first time in reading a book, I felt like I was one of the characters travelling alongside Sal and Dean. Sal tells these crazy tales so vividly that I seem to be able to recall them myself, almost as if they are memories of my own. I guess contextually, knowing that these tales actually are of Jack’s own, it makes sense why they seem so tangible to me as a reader. However, at the time of reading, I had no idea of the whole Dulouz Legend and therefore, I found myself to be constantly perplexed at the mastery he yields when crafting these deeply intimate and detailed descriptions of life on the road.
Kerouac’s Stream-Of-Consciousness: A Mind Forever on the Move
It is not only the way Kerouac writes which amazes me, but also how he perceives the world. As a narrator, he pays special attention to these cute little images or random thoughts that wouldn’t even occur noteworthy to most people. For example, an extract that my mind always seems to return to is placed early on within the novel, when Sal is spending time besides a bay with his friend Remi Boncoeur. Instead of merely describing an old boat, or recounting his and Remi’s actions, Sal imagines the time when “there’d been a blue-eyed captain in here.” He then, to no real agenda nor avail says:
“I’d love to sleep in this old ship some night when the fog comes in and the thing creaks and you hear the big B-O of the buoys.” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957). Page 65
This passage has always stood out to us. Its unexpected softness and simplicity amidst the restlessness of the novel sings to Sal’s innocence. His wish to sleep on the old boat is almost childlike, it is as if the steady sway of the bouys and the water will lull him to sleep and then eventually, bring him some sort of peace.
It’s points like these that I mean. Kerouac sees the world in such a way – often melancholic but simultaneously so deeply innocent. He just wants to sleep on an old boat for no other reason that to hear its creaks in the night and indulge in his dream of the ghost of the captain wandering it’s decks. And for some reason, I really can’t seem to shift that thought from my mind. It really doesn’t even add that much more to the narrative, it is just rather sweet and brings depth and feelings and life to his descriptions.
I guess this is just the way Kerouac goes about his life and it’s not that unfathomable of a point that I may be raising – but still, I have not come across another writer who adds these little streams of thoughts within their writings as well as Kerouac does.
“I wish Dean and Carlo were there – then I realised they would be out of place and unhappy.” Page 48
His prose reads like a thinking brain, and these little extra notes I bring attention to are those sparks of thoughts that burst briefly into your mind, hundreds of times a day between sentences or brief glances at your surroundings. Nobody really ever even feels the need to say them aloud, let alone write them down.
On the Road: The Illusion of Arrival and The Romance of Abandonment
As the novel progressed, I began to develop a genuine fear that Sal was slowly losing his mind in this endless search for meaning. It was as if he kept saying to himself: “Okay, I’ll go to this place, or I’ll meet this person and then I’ll be where I wanna be,” and then each time he arrives there, his mind becomes occupied with the thought of getting on the road again to continue his search of whatever he is looking for.
Even when he meets Terry, he describes his time spent with her as deciding “to hide from the world one more night with her” (p. 80) and “mixing up [their] souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.” (p. 81) But what world was he hiding from? Why couldn’t he just spend time with her without worrying about how hard it would soon become to say goodbye? Why was this goodbye necessary?
And then, come the end of Part one, our Sal is tired and weary and in a desperate frenzy to get home. When he finally arrives in New York City (in the middle of Times Square in rush hour) he delivers one hell of a paragraph which in turn works to further distance himself from the place and people he wanted so badly to return to.
“Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had travelled eight thousand miles around the American continent and was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream – grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City.” Page 96
This passage really encapsulates the whole feel of On the Road within a single paragraph. The long, winding sentence culminates in this rapid list of verbs, working to mirror the overwhelming pace of New York. It forces readers to feel the same rush as Sal, who cannot seem to process what he is seeing. Even in his arrival, disillusionment it revealed – his ‘home’ has become just another stop in his restless and endless search for meaning.
Within the character of Sal, I believe there to be of great significance of Seneca’s ideology of travelling not being a cure for a troubled mind. As he notes, everywhere you go, you also take yourself – your thoughts and patterns of thoughts – along on the journey with you. He becomes a master of observation. A master of seeing what is wrong yet never confronting it truly. He is a master of the endless pursuit, of escapism with no escape route.
Dean Moriarty: Our Burning, Beautiful Boy
Now, onto Dean. Dean seems to be troubled. But he has a good heart, and I really do hope he eventually was able to find his father. I think that he is fine, perhaps if anything he could slow down a little. He seems to have such a zest for life, a true ‘Joie de vivre’.
“ ‘Oh smell the people!’ yelled Dean with his face out the window, sniffing. ‘Ah! God! Life!’ ” Page 127
And later on, when they are in Mexico and he promised to take Victor home with him, and his excitement of their very way of life, how he looked everywhere all at once, how beautiful. How he lights fire to everything he passes…
“I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers.” Page 236
There was only one point when I really saw this raw exuberance of Dean fade, and this was when the duo decide to go to Italy and Dean grows solemn in his agreeance. I remember being so genuinely happy at this future of them exploring Italy together, and annoyed when Dean’s newly found fatherhood had stopped him from going – even if Sal hadn’t minded. In retrospect, I do wonder if Dean’s sudden sadness was because however much he wanted to please Sal, he knew, truly and deep in his heart that he would soon be distracted by some other dream of his and would inevitably flake out on his dear friend Sal. However, in truth, I don’t think Sal minded.
1944 Denver mugshot of Neal Cassady – Who Dean Moriarty is based on.
I was left with this feeling that Sal and Dean have this mutual understanding between each other. Even in the almost tragic ending when Dean is watching Sal drive away, I think they both knew that this wasn’t Sal giving up on him, it was just bad timing.
Staying Away From the Road: Why This Novel Haunts Me
On the Road is brilliant, and so is the way Kerouac perceives and understands life. I read it two years ago and try not to think of it too much. I know that sounds strange, but it’s because I find it dangerous. After I read it, I boarded a plane and spent a month travelling around Southeast Africa with no agenda other than living on the road, under the southern hemisphere for a little bit of time. Even revisiting these pages to write this now, I feel the longing for travel returning. That is of true honour to the quality of Kerouac’s writing. It is a book I stay away from because it sparks this grasping for a lifestyle that we probably shouldn’t live but so desperately want to. A life dwelling on old, haunted ships for no reason other than to hear its creeks, a life far away from money and conformism, a life on the road, a life searching.
The Ploughman’s Community Comments
Kyle, Spain: On page 52 (of my copy) there is this great passage: “I wanted to see Denver ten years ago when they were all children…” It goes on to paint a beautiful picture of the springtime, and of hope and youth. It stands out to me because the rest of the novel seems to be about Sal searching for something in the future but here his desire is to go back to the past. He knows the impossibility of this dream and yet he dreams it still. It made me wonder if he was just indulging in him other dreams too – if perhaps he knew that there was never going to be a destination for a life spent on the road. I found this concept quite interesting.
Elizabeth, Greece: I feel in love with this book, and all its surrounding culture… Mr Tambourine Man, Howl, Mexico City Blues, America, wow. What a ‘genre’.
Ann, Scotland: Every character that was introduced, Kerouac went out of his way to note their flaws. How human!
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