Thoughts about On the Road

Kerouac takes us along his great cross country adventure, sharing his exciting experiences and his own reflections. After doing some background reading, mostly Wikipedia and the novel's introduction, it's incredible the story behind the making of the novel. To think that he had mostly written the manuscript for the novel in a marathon-like few weeks time is just unfathomable. I'm going through it, just thinking, gosh, how can anyone organize, chronologically, such an elaborate story, filled with unforgettable characters and tangent plots, in such a short time span. But after ruminating over it for a while, these were basically his life's events just spilling out onto paper. He was limited really by his own memory and the rapidity of his typing, which, according to wikipedia and the intro, was pretty damn fast.

Now, this is a slight tangent to my thoughts about the novel, or perhaps it isn't-it's too late to tell accurately-but this whole, letting life spill onto pages, a sorta fictional autobiography if you will, reminds me a lot of another story that I recently read called A million little pieces. Of course, anyone who's heard of the "memior" knows of the controversy of there being several inaccuracies in the partly fabricated autobiography. Now, these two stories are very different, I'm not trying to compare the content of their stories, just the way that they were made and that they were received. With on the road, i suppose there's a realistic-ness around it, and a certain lore, that almost insinuates that Kerouac could very well have done all that was mentioned in the novel. While i felt that what made AMLP so intriguing at first was some of the incredible stuff mentioned in the memoir. It was made even more appealing and enthralling since we were told it was all true and that all of the "incredible" events actually occurred. I felt that once the author came out from behind the curtain, per say, and exposed the truth of his memoir, it lost most, if not, all of its appeal because then the story was stripped down to just an unlikable character that has several unlikely incidents happen to him. As for on the road, the character is an amicable guy, the story telling is engrossing, and the events are not too far fetched to conceive actually happening. I guess I've gone on this tangent to just let off some steam from forcing myself to read AMLP all the way through, which I sometimes randomly do (as my roommate can attest to :)).

Now briefly back to my thoughts of on the road, since, truthfully, I'm only half way through it. But what can really be said other than, damn, I wanna join Sal paradise and his beloved friend dean. their story, the "beat" generation, it speaks out to me. i think it naturally speaks out to everyone. Let me explain by going into what I see the beat generation as embodying.

there were several explanations of what folks thought that "beat" meant. Two that I found very interesting, and dangit, yes they were both from the intro and Wiki again, was (1) beatific, as in the catholic term would have it, to be in realization of god as enjoyed by those in heaven and (2) to be in a realm of exalted exhaustion. When I think of this, and the crowd that associated with Kerouac and identified with the beat generation, like Ginsberg and Burroughs, I can't help but imagine a group of intimate, close, rebellious intellectuals meeting to sort out the entire panorama of life through their specific arts (poetry and literature in general). the sheer artistic ability that was concentrated in that small group is just overwhelming, i must admit, i'm jealous. But this group of people, with their respective talents, they saw the situation of the world about them, the sheer craziness of the stuff and life that was occurring around them, and they lashed back with their works. I think that's what defines the beat generation really. The group that was tired getting swept away as the people they saw and knew, by war, by drugs, by sickness, by poverty, and yearned for more in life.

this is what the book addresses, this whole trek of on the road, it's about not being tied down in life, about adventure seeking, about expanding our experiences, growing, learning, becoming more exalted in our life journey. It's also about the tribulations that come from breaking out of the norm, of breaking the conventional cycle of life, and how exhausting it is. All culminating to the point that you find yourself among the exalted and exhausted, the beat generation.