On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
by Jack Kerouac
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jack KerouacEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-06-01
ISBN: 0140283293
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780140283297
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
Book Review: The Masterpiece as Dusty Museum Piece
Summary: 5 Stars
WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT:
This 1957 autobiographical novel tells of two 20-something protagonists who criss-cross the continental United States during a string of comical, sex-filled, alcohol-slicked automobile road trips. The novel is told in the first person by the protagonist named "Sal Paradise" (a character who greatly resembles the book's real-life author, Jack Kerouac). "Sal Paradise" travels most of the time in the company of his beloved buddy "Dean Moriarty" (a character who is based very closed on Kerouac's real-life travel buddy Neal Cassady).
"On the Road" showcases a small group of young men and women (all characters based on real-life acquaintances of Kerouac) who lived and were bored in the America of the late 1940's and early 1950's. They find their parents' generation intolerably strait-laced, square, and boring. To shake off their shackles and find their own way, these young people hit the road. America's highways are their escape route; booze is their fuel and marijuana their elixir. Sex and live jazz complete the tableau.
WHY THIS BOOK IS HARD TO START/PENETRATE:
REASON #1. Kerouac as author isn't tidy. The whole book is sort of single idea (e.g.: society is stale and corrupt, so go on a road trip to numb your pain and possibly find enlightenment), and its 300+ pages do not, in my opinion, push the protagonist into a state of relief or enlightenment. (Indeed--maybe this circularity and lack of development of Sal Paradise's character was Kerouac's way of saying--like Samuel Beckett in "En Attendant Godot"--that, essentially, life stinks and then you die.
REASON #2. The book's structure is sloppy and far from being "Type A Personality" tidy. In other words, while "On the Road" is divided into "Parts" of uneven length and in turn these "Parts" are divided into numbered (but titleless) chapters, this putative organization doesn't really help the reader along in his/her journey through the text.
REASON #3. Kerouac starts the book "in medias res." There is no explanation at the beginning of the text who precisely the characters are and why they should be important to the reader.
REASON #4. Kerouac never really announces anywhere in "On the Road": (1.) what the book is about; (2.) what it's trying to do; or (3.) how it's supposed to affect its readers. (And that's not necessarily a bad thing; it's a stylistic choice made by Kerouac). But woe is the reader who tries to slip into "On the Road" without being willing to do some hard, grinding, groping reading during the first few dozen pages. It's a rough kick-off.
HOW TO DESCRIBE JACK KEROUAC'S WRITING STYLE:
Kerouac's style is intriguing, and has been copied enormously since the publication of "On the Road" back in 1957. (For this reason, it is hard--fifty years later--to see how much of an innovator he was.) In his first-person narration, Kerouac is noun- and verb-heavy (that is, he goes sparingly on adjectives and adverbs), and composes in very long sentences and beefy, half- or three-quarter-page-long paragraphs.
His vocabulary is banal, ordinary, everyday, and unexceptional. (I doubt this is an accident.) Although he describes a good bit of sex, violence, and argumentation, swear words are nearly invisible, and then only ones found in the text could be uttered today on television without a fine from the FCC. Although Kerouac has an excellent ear for dialogue, there is very little direct (i.e., quoted) dialogue in the book. Most of it is paraphrasing or else Sal Paradise's capsule descriptions of discussions that had taken place earlier in time in the novel.
Kerouac's narrator Sal Paradise slips, on occasion, into moments of lyricism. Cleverly, these moments of verbal purity sneak up on the reader. They usually involve the protagonist's delight with nature, or with freedom. Upon re-reading, however, these moments of lyricism seem ever so slightly purple and adolescent. (Again--perhaps Kerouac styled them this way on purpose).
Kerouac does two things brilliantly. First, he creates dozens of hilarious or even laugh-out-loud-funny scenes, but the narrator never turns into a hyena over them. Sal Paradise plays it quiet and wry. Second, Kerouac's descriptions of jazz music being played live in seedy clubs is fascinating. Breaking down each musical instrument into a descriptive sentence (often a run-on or otherwise swollen), he threads these instruments/sentences into a single paragraph that, in turn, plays within the reader's mind as if he or she were actually sitting in the club listening to the music.
WHY THIS BOOK WAS RADICAL IN 1957:
America's youth in 1957 was--if we simplify--a repressed, WASPy, serious, no-nonsense, Pat Boone and Mickey Mouse Club brigade of crew-cutted and pig-tailed squares. And then (like the snarling Elvis Presley just a year earlier) came "On the Road": a book about slightly older kids (in their early 20's) who were sassy, rebellious, two-fisted, booze-slurping, Cadillac-trashing, sexed-up good-for-nothings. What real-life teen can resist a fictitious, super-cool rebel like Neal Cassady? Keep in mind that none of the main characters in "On the Road" ends up getting punished or "put in his place." Certainly the fact that the naughty young people in "On the Road" actually "get away" with their naughtiness must have been a shocker back in 1957.
WHY THIS BOOK IS A CULTURAL TOTEM:
For the past fifty years (and most particularly from 1957 to the late 1970's), "On the Road" has been a sort of Bible and talisman for American high school kids who are fed up with adults and itching with Wanderlust. Let's call Jack Kerouac the James Dean of the high-school intelligentsia set. We've now had several generations of angry teens who found in "On the Road" a digestable chunk of serious, no-longer-for-children "grown-up" literature that, paradoxically, perfectly spells out what it means to be a ticked-off, mad-as-hell, bored young person.
WHY THIS BOOK IS ANTIQUATED (i.e., "DUSTY"):
Kerouac, during his lifetime, said that "On the Road" was about internal quests for truth. But the thrilling part of the book, at least for me, is the nutty, fast-paced, and often dangerous criss-crossing of the country in speeding and recklessly-driven borrowed or stolen automobiles. But the United States of the late 1940's and early 1950's is no longer as big, broad, mysterious, and fascinating in 2007.
Think of all the things that have shrunken the physical size and ethereal mysteriousness of the U.S.A.: cheap and frequent **air** travel; an incredibly dense and efficient network of national highways; broadcast television and then cable television; inexpensive long-distance telephone rates, and then cell phones; and a uniquely American habit of children moving far, far away from the city or town in which they were born and raised.
In other words, the whole mystery of hurtling through the highways of America at night is no longer as exciting as it must have been a half-century ago. In fact, taking a long car trip like Sal and Dean sounds in 2007 kind of like a pain in the neck.
So, just like a Ford Model T, "On the Road" was brilliant in its time, but must now be confined to a very honored place behind a museum's glass partition, with full recognition of the greatness it had in its own time and for a few decades thereafter. We just don't do it like that anymore.
Summary of On the Road (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
In its time Jack Kerouac's masterpiece was the bible of the Beat Generation, the essential prose accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg's Howl. While it stunned the public and literary establishment when it was published in 1957, it is now recognized as an American classic. With On the Road, Kerouac discovered his voice and his true subject?the search for a place as an outsider in America.
On the Road swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns, and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveler and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.
"Life is great, and few can put the zest and wonder and sadness and humor of it on paper more interestingly than Kerouac."
?Luther Nichols, San Francisco Examiner
"Just as, more than any other novel of the Twenties, The Sun Also Rises came to be regarded as the testament of the Lost Generation, so it seems certain that On the Road will come to be known as that of the Beat Generation."
?Gilbert Millstein, The New York Times
@Didn?tTypeOnTP! For TWITTERATURE of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On the Road by Jack Kerouac.
From Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less
On the Road is truly an influential work. Overnight, it propelled Jack Kerouac from unknown status to "king of the beats" and then helped awaken a nation of youth who shook America out of the 1950s and ushered in the excitement of the 1960s. The novel continues to inspire and has picked up a new generation of followers in the 1980s and 1990s. On the Road follows Sal Paradise as he traverses the American continent in search of new people, ideas, and adventures. But it's the way Sal and his friends--primarily Dean Moriarty--look at the world with a mixture of sad-eyed naivete and wild-eyed abandon that causes the rumbling in the soul of so many who read it.
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