DEAN CODY CASSADY MENTIONED KEROUAC’S WORK IN A FORUM DISCUSSION. This reminded me that I had not finished the book. Picking it up again, I found it bookmarked on page 99. Unable to fathom why I had left it unread at this page, and a little abashed by my initial futile attempt to read this cult writer, I decided to finish it this time.
The narrator is Sal, a young writer based on Kerouac himself, who began writing when he was in his late teens. However, the dominant presence in the book is Kerouac’s creation, Dean Moriarty. With his three marriages, two divorces, his time in reform school, his penchant for stealing cars and driving at break-neck speed down America’s seemingly unending roads, and also his abandonment of his sick friend, Sal, Dean Moriarty makes for an engaging, if infuriating (at times) protagonist.
Among the other characters, Old Bull Lee – who reads Spengler, Marquis de Sade, Shakespeare and Mayan codices between mashing birdseed to ‘roll in cigarettes or boiling codeine cough syrup down to black mash’ - is memorable. Similarly, Sal’s aunt, who sends him cheques when he is stuck somewhere in the vast American landscape and who weaves his family’s clothes into a mat for his bedroom floor, is another unforgettable portrayal.
Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky seem to underpin Kerouac’s search through his protagonists for an idyll of individual freedom from society and family. Kerouac’s work later came to represent the beat generation’s search for liberation from social conventions and finding one’s own authentic being. Reading the book in the 2000s, one cannot help but be struck by the paradox that the beat generation’s search for freedom was based on the affluence of the very society that it rejected. I struggled with Kerouac’s use of Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky. However, perhaps one has to view the relevance of these thinkers for Kerouac in the light of the particular context of this generation. Dean Moriarty’s manic cry, ‘Lessgo!’, and also ‘Gurls, gurls, gurls’ symbolises this quite naive and hedonistic longing and indulgence.
There’s an underlying sadness in the trail of abandoned women and children that both Moriarty and Sal leave in their wake as they traverse the vast land of America. Likewise, Moriarty’s long and futile search for his father casts a shadow over these young men’s peripatetic life of exploration and fun.
Some of the most moving and beautiful passages in the book are about Mexico. To quote an example:
We reached the approaches of the last plateau. Now the sun was golden, the air keen blue, and the desert with its occasional rivers a riot of sandy, hot space and sudden Biblical tree shade . . .
Besides this lyrical evocation of the landscape, Kerouac’s depiction of the destitute Mexicans and their daily struggles to make ends meet lays bare the exploitation of this land and its people by its bigger and more powerful neighbour and, for me, this was particularly poignant.
I’m glad that I returned to finish the book.
– Golden Langur
