I didn't read this at the appropriate age (16?) because . . . well, I don't know. Then in college and graduate school I heard a lot of people sneer at On the Road claiming that it had a lot of badly-written sentences and was a 3rd-rate Thomas Wolfe pastiche with some Hemingway sauce.
Well, while I was traveling around in Wales and England I read it on trains, planes, and automobiles, and I loved it. I think that the crucial insight is that it's about madness in the form of Dean. To be sure, the narrator -- Sal -- is always telling us he's getting back on the road, and there are a lot of adventures and hijinks and so forth. But the true subject is Dean's inability to have any depth of emotion and/or really care about anything, beyond juvenile admiration of his "friends."
It helps a lot that Sal doesn't quite understand this: So he joins a long pantheon of slightly-out-of-it narrators in American fiction, who tell us about a "great character," where, reading between the lines, we readers can see that those great characters are overblown (think Nick Carraway / Jay Gatsby).
Now I may need to read Big Sur and the Dharma Bums.
Show lessI didn't read this at the appropriate age (16?) because . . . well, I don't know. Then in college and graduate school I heard a lot of people sneer at On the Road claiming that it had a lot of badly-written sentences and was a 3rd-rate Thomas Wolfe pastiche with some Hemingway sauce.
Well, while I was traveling around in Wales and England I read it on trains, planes, and automobiles, and I loved it. I think that the crucial insight is that it's about madness in the form of Dean. To be sure, the narrator -- Sal -- is always telling us he's getting back on the road, and there are a lot of adventures and hijinks and so forth. But the true subject is Dean's inability to have any depth of emotion and/or really care about anything, beyond juvenile admiration of his "friends."
It helps a lot that Sal doesn't quite understand this: So he joins a long pantheon of slightly-out-of-it narrators in American fiction, who tell us about a "great character," where, reading between the lines, we readers can see that those great characters are overblown (think Nick Carraway / Jay Gatsby).
Now I may need to read Big Sur and the Dharma Bums.
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I'll give Kerouac credit: On the Road has a propulsive, relentless movement. Bereft of paragraphs or chapter breaks, it just keeps churning along, dragging the reader along for the ride.
On the other hand, I was more than a little surprised at how small it made everything seem. Where I was expecting something exploring the epic grandeur of America (something more along the line of Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie), Kerouac delivers a story so obsessed with such a small fraction of the country, even as it travels from coast to coast, that I just found myself wondering about all that was omitted. He returns over and over to the same places and the same people, and while I enjoyed their kaleidoscopic bacchanal, I got no sense at all of The Road.
To be honest, aside from the possibility that it accurately captures the sense of what life was like for that generation (a proposition I'm by no means convinced of), I'm not exactly sure why this is considered such a classic.
I think the dirty little secret of On the Road is that Kerouac doesn't actually like the road.
Show lessI'll give Kerouac credit: On the Road has a propulsive, relentless movement. Bereft of paragraphs or chapter breaks, it just keeps churning along, dragging the reader along for the ride.
On the other hand, I was more than a little surprised at how small it made everything seem. Where I was expecting something exploring the epic grandeur of America (something more along the line of Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie), Kerouac delivers a story so obsessed with such a small fraction of the country, even as it travels from coast to coast, that I just found myself wondering about all that was omitted. He returns over and over to the same places and the same people, and while I enjoyed their kaleidoscopic bacchanal, I got no sense at all of The Road.
To be honest, aside from the possibility that it accurately captures the sense of what life was like for that generation (a proposition I'm by no means convinced of), I'm not exactly sure why this is considered such a classic.
I think the dirty little secret of On the Road is that Kerouac doesn't actually like the road.
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Wanted to love this book, but did not. Some of the writing redeemed it - sparkling prose. My unexpected reaction: There is hope for the Millenials / current young generation yet!
Show lessWanted to love this book, but did not. Some of the writing redeemed it - sparkling prose. My unexpected reaction: There is hope for the Millenials / current young generation yet!
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