On the road

  This book is famous and infamous, and justifiably so. It captures perfectly the attitude and outlook of a segment of the (especially male) population, especially in the 60's and 70's, and especially in America. But it is a celebration of irresponsibility, of rebellion not just against the system but against the people immediately around the rebel. The hero is true to himself, but he sure isn't true to his girl. Nevertheless, considering how the book was tossed down apparently with so little rewriting, the book's imagery and style really are remarkably good. And the prose style and the worldview projected by the narrative are definitely in harmony. It was a clarion call for the non-conformity of the 1960s.

  Just as with John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, the circumstances of the creation of *On the Road* are also important to those who value the book. Kerouac claimed to have lived the life so described. The characters are known to be based on those within Kerouac's circle. Further, the romantic story of its creation is that Kerouac wrote it all in one burst over three weeks on long scrolls of paper. This story feeds into the Romantic view that genius is a gift, not labored after. Evidence that there were drafts of sections of it in notebooks years before the scroll typing and editing afterward does not dampen the ardor of its fans. Whatever else Kerouac was, he was a master of marketing the appearance of authenticity to the baby-boom generation of rebel-wannabes.

  It has been argued that much of the emotion of a story is generated by the moral of the story (Flesch Comeuppance 2007). If so, it is worth thinking about what the moral of this book is. And that moral seems to be that one should embrace the present over the considerations of any future. In terms of "the cricket versus the ant" fable, this book is all cricket. That value was much easier to hold during a time when the United States was the uncontested economic giant of the earth, and squandering the future didn't come with too high a price. (To say nothing of the possibility of nuclear war ending the world as we know it at any moment.) The rootless genius seeking epiphanies was celebrated in the 1960s as refusing to sell out to conventional life, but the political economy behind that celebration was promoting consumerism on leveraged debt. The seeds of the financial crisis of 2008 were sown in the 1950s.

  On the Road opens with the narrator, Salvador Paradise (nothing symbolic in that name), recovering from having been left by his wife. So he starts out with a devil-may-care attitude toward women and socially prudent behavior. So for all the women and their children who are abandoned by the narrator and his band of brothers in the book, a woman started the cycle of rejection. The theme of "bro's before ho's" seems to be an example of what Robin Fox (in an essay in Gottschall's The Literary Animal) would describe as male bonding that does not allow the heterosexual bond to break it. The need to abandon responsibility for the road also echoes back to the days of the frontier.

  The main character of the book is Dean Moriarity, a former juvenile delinquent who is questing after a life on the road and its experiences. His quest is couched in religious terms. The narrator can see his holiness, even when others cannot. Dean is a natural genius, fearless in his rootlessness and selfless selfishness. At times, even Dean has settled down with a women to raise children, but the narrator intrudes, needing to quest after the road himself, and takes Dean away on the adventure again. Other (usually male) characters join them to seek the holy grail of expanded consciousness, using drugs, alcohol, and sex in their quest. Dean can be seen as an old testament prophet of hedonism, or as a scapegoat of the social order.

  The book is well constructed though episodic and repetitious to the point of boring, but the point of the book is a bit questionable. For readers who have been victimized by those with a hedonistic, careless attitude, this book could seem immoral.