This isn’t just a jolly quest for “kicks” and beautiful girls and good times to be had at cheap prices. It’s a book about death and the search for something meaningful to hold on to—the famous search for “IT,” a truth larger than the self, which, of course, is never found. – Meghan O’Rourke
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was published on September 5, 1957.
I was just ten, going on eight, soon to be the size of a grown man.
When I did read On The Road, I think I might have thought, I want to be that guy.
But which one?
Of course, it’s a fine edge even Kerouac couldn’t handle.
Making truth into fiction is one thing, making fiction into reality is quite another.
Beatniking is a struggle.
Jack Kerouac Revisited
“Madness” in On the Road Between Stigma and Glorification
Wigand, Moritz E. MD; Rüsch, Nicolas MD; Becker, Thomas MD
Abstract
On the Road is a classic American novel that appeared at a time of great political, cultural, and psychiatric upheaval. Published almost 60 years ago, it still exerts great influence. We propose that the affirmative approach toward “madness” in the novel can enlighten our understanding of alternative perceptions of mental illness. The novel is analyzed with quantifying and narrative methods focusing on the concept of madness, which is a prominent theme in the novel. Stigma and glorification of madness can be found throughout the text. The positive sides and the pitfalls of an overly positive attitude toward mental illness and minority group members are discussed, including benevolent discrimination, recovery, and positive psychiatry.
Sounds heady.
But I do like the sound of the affirmative approach toward ‘madness’.
Give it credit, the book provided a sequel to the ending of “Huckleberry Finn,” with its impulse to head west into the great unknown of America’s underground. It spurred a generation of young Americans to take up the travel lifestyle. … Practically everyone has heard of “On the Road,” yet I imagine that few have had the fortitude to wade through its dense, ricocheting prose, which was meant to copy the be-bop rhythms of jazz.
https://www.northernexpress.com/news/opinion/article-2713-on-the-road-revisited/
I couldn’t help scrutinizing it as an artifact of the great tensions of postwar America, with the behemoth of the Great Depression and the horrors of the death camps and the Atomic Bomb lurking, like a freighter coming over the horizon, at the corner of the eye. The novel was composed the same year that the United States began testing the atom bomb in the Nevada desert. And by the 1950s, when Kerouac was writing On the Road, American artists and intellectuals felt increasingly besieged by the atmosphere of enforced social conformity.
https://slate.com/culture/2007/09/the-american-sacrament-that-is-on-the-road.html
Another thing that makes it difficult to talk about On the Road as a book rather than a totem to the myth of its production—the Benzedrine-fueled weeks of writing—shapes our reading of it just as much as the reality of its reception does. I’m sure that plenty of teenagers who read On the Road regard it as valuable because of the way it was produced—they see it as testimony to the power of raw feelings in art.
https://slate.com/culture/2007/09/would-on-the-road-have-been-better-as-a-memoir.html
That “God is pooh bear” nonsense in the novel’s closing rhapsody is as ugly a pimple on the ass as can be found in a famous American book. I wince every time I read it, a full-brain wince, and I try to excuse it as a case of Kerouac’s love of rhythm and momentum getting the best of his tonal sensibilities. When your prose is like a rushing tide, a lot of trash gets swept onto the beach, as happens repeatedly in On the Road.
https://slate.com/culture/2007/09/on-the-roadrevisited-masterpiece-or-masturbation.html
