tkd_grant's Full Review: Jack Kerouac - On the Road
On the Road is one of those books that reminds us of how uptight and conventional our society is today. We all get stuck in the same routine, day after day, year after year. We all get the urge to escape from our habitual, ordinary lives, but very few of us actually have the gut-power to follow through, due to familial and financial responsibilities.
For Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, daily life is never ‘ordinary life.’ In their college years, neither has a stable job, neither knows what they want to do in life, yet they don’t seem to care. They go to bed each night not worrying about tomorrow might have in store—they take each day as it comes, they’re beat. The story follows their spontaneous lives as they travel cross-country multiple times—meeting new people, hitchhiking, relationships, “making it” with a countless number of girls, meeting up with old pals pondering life, partying, drinking, smoking “tea,” etc…
Kerouac was brilliant in the fact that he didn’t really create a solid, concrete plot. It exemplifies the theme of spontaneity and not caring about what manana has to offer. As the reader turns each page, he or she doesn’t know what to expect. For example, you'll reading about the two young men driving through the barren deserts of Mexico. Within the next few pages you'll reading about the two being as high as a kite and visiting a local brothel. Once that’s over and done with, you find yourself stranded in the middle of the jungle being practically eaten alive by pesky insects.
The free-flowing writing style is easily one of the best aspects of the book. Kerouac writes beautifully, creating images in the mind of the reader that are likely to last for a long time. There are multiple scenes that stick out in my mind. One I vividly remember occurs at the beginning of the book, when Sal is traveling to Denver alone for the first time:
”I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I’d never seen, …and really I didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn’t scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.”
It’s passages like that that make this book so memorable and one of a kind. I will admit that the book can get long-winded at some points, but as the reader pushes on through there’s sure to be another memorable moment just around the corner. There are a lot of characters in the story and it can be hard to remember each and every one of them, but that’s not really the point of the book. I mean, how many people do we face daily, and do we remember all of their names? Exactly.
This isn’t a book you want to rush through. Set aside some time each day and read this book slowly, savoring each of the wild adventures Sal and Dean encounter on a daily basis. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.
On the Road chronicles Jack Kerouac's years traveling the North American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, "a sideburned hero of the snowy West....More at HotBookSale
Jack Kerouac s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be Beat and has inspired every generation since its initial publication m...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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