Passionate, Poetic, and Nihlistic

books:

	• On the Road Jack Kerouac, David Carradine DH Audio, 1986 average customer review:based on 630 reviews
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highly recommended

Kerouac's Masterpiece

This is by far Kerouac's best work. It details his adventures with Neil Cassiday in way only Kerouac could. This book defines the beat movement and defines, for me at least how the world was long before I was born. Being only 20 years old I cannot imagine hitch hiking across the country, in the present time that would not only be socially unacceptable but highly dangerous.

However this book is a quick and fun read that you don't want to put down. Kerouac's writing style is great and original and cannot be matched.

A True Classic

It is absolutely amazing that any novel could be written in just three weeks, let alone this defining portrayal of the United States in the early 1950's. This is a true masterpiece.

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Passionate, Poetic, and Nihlistic

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) was initially fascinated by the heavily ornate style of novelist Thomas Wolfe, a writer best known for LOOK HOMEWARD, ANGEL; at the same time, however, he led an outsider's life that placed him on the fringe of American society, drifting across the country with little more than the clothes on his back, drinking hard, using drugs, and occasionally involved--at least in a passive sense--with a series of criminal activies, most notably Lucien Carr's murder of David Kammerer. In 1951, however, Kerouac suddenly shed his infatuation with Wolfe and, in a three week spree fueled by drugs and alcohol, wrote ON THE ROAD.

The book had tremendous difficulty finding a publisher, and did not reach the public until 1957, when it tapped into the rising undercurrent of society's rising dissatisfaction with the American status quo. Highly autobiographical in nature, it chronicles Kerouac's off-the-cuff roamings from New York to California and all points in between and presents a fairly nihlistic portrait of hustlers, users, abusers, derelicts, and the exhausted desperates of the era, all of them presented in a random and kaleidoscopic mannner.

There's no doubt that ON THE ROAD was and is a highly influential book, inspiring everyone from Bob Dylan to Hunter S. Thompson; it essentially reshaped notions about subject and style. But almost from the moment of its publication there has been a core complaint: what, ultimately, is the book about? What is the point? There is no plot per se, no linear story per se, simply a series of incidents and events and portraits. The leading characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (in actual fact Kerouac and Neal Cassady) rush headlong, speeding for the sake of speed, engaging in activities that raise their levels of desensitization and lead them to exhausted ennui that self-destructs into madness, self-pity, and despair--and the work ends as suddenly as it began.

In terms of literary success, the language is the thing. Kerouac can turn a phrase with the best of 'em, and his passions roll of the page in a series of bright images that transcribe the power of youth, the urge we all have to do the unacceptable just for the fun of it, a great rush of words that explode and recombine and tremble in an amazing jumble of the beautiful and the sordid. In a very real sense, language is "the point," the way in which Kerouac speaks is "the point." But there is indeed an overall point, although it may not be one that many will appreciate, much less enjoy.

The point, ultimately, is that there is no point. It is all speed for the sake of speed, movement for the sake of movement, and the fact that in spite of their nationwide crisscrossing and adventures, in spite of the passing affairs, drugs, alcohol, arguments about philosophy, and jolts of jazz neither Sal nor Dean are able to find any actual point or purpose--something that Sal seems to ultimately understand but that Dean is never really clear on. As such, ON THE ROAD not only taps into the underlying dissatisfaction that characterized America of the 1950s, it also forecasts the restlessness of the 1960s and the hedonism of the 1970s and 1980s.

It's easy to grant ON THE ROAD status on all these points, but it is more to difficult to recommend it as a "casual" read. It is not, and never really has been, the sort of thing you pick up at random; it requires a fair amount of concentration and, ideally, a certain prior knowledge of the "beat" writers, thinkers, and figures upon which the work is founded. It also requires the ability to read without any particular expectation in terms of structure and narrative line, as well the ability to place its dated slang and attitudes in historical perspective. If you can do all that--you'll love it. If not, this is one you'd do better to pass by.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

First published in 1957, this novel epitomized to the world the Beat philosophy. It chronicles a spontaneous and wandering life style founded both on jazz and drug-induced visions.

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