Mad Drunken Americans in the Mighty Land

Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road during a three week Benzedrine spree when he was 34 in 1956. He'd made several unsuccessful earlier attempts at realizing the novel. This time he taped together ten 12 foot rolls of tracing paper so that he wouldn't have to break the momentum of his "kickwriting" in order to change sheets.

He wrote frenetic, repetitive descriptions as if he was typing the words as soon as they entered his overclocked mind. He translated into syllables the notes of the tenor sax solos he heard in bee bop clubs. The story and the writing style constantly refer to jazz.

I expected I would disdain On the Road because I dislike improvisation. I decided to read it only because Kerouac influenced artists I admire, like Hunter S. Thompson and Ben Gibbard. I had a pleasant expectation of discovering a self-indulgent, badly written work that would prove the Beats were a bunch of pretentious clowns.

So I was surprised to find that On the Road is a huge amount of fun. It contains hauntingly beautiful descriptions of the American landscape. Kerouac's writing gives the land its actual scale. The reader feels like he is on the terrain that Kerouac describes, as in this passage about raucous drinkers in a Colorado mining town:

Great laughter rang from all sides. I wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess--across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent. (Part One, Chapter 8).

He relates the heft of the North American land mass in just a few lines:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all the raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast ... I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (Part Five).

The main characters, Sal Paradise, who is Kerouac's alter ego, and Dean Moriarty, who is actually Neal Cassady, are admirable. Their energy never flags. They never complain. They constantly remind the reader that life should be celebrated.

Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness--everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being. (Part Three, Chapter 3).

Kerouac said, "All is mind." I think he believed that the physical world was a veil for the true reality that consisted of consciousness. He regarded his hero, Dean Moriarty, as God's angel, and saw himself as a lesser one. This spiritual outlook is incongruous when considered alongside Kerouac's alcoholism. He drank as hard as a body can drink. Sudden abdominal hemorrhaging killed him when he was 46.