a.k.a. V.J.

Jack Kerouac’s On the Road is a book that I’ve seen referenced all through my adult life, but I never thought much about actually reading it. To be completely honest, I didn’t even realize it was a novel until a few months ago. For the longest time, I was under the impression the book was a nonfiction account of Kerouac’s travels around the country. (That impression actually wasn’t far off, as the book is reportedly a roman à clef, with the characters being thinly disguised versions of the author and various other figures in the Beat movement.)

What inspired me to read On the Road, I can’t really say. The notion just came to me one day and I went with it. Coincidentally, that’s largely how Sal Paradise, the novel’s narrator, and his friend Dean Moriarty tend to approach life.

The book is a series of anecdotes about Sal, Dean, and a shifting assortment of their friends crisscrossing America in the late 1940s. There are various pretexts for these travels, but most of them are inspired by some combination of aimlessness, trying to run away from themselves, and genuine wanderlust. The characters are usually broke, often under the influence of mind-altering substances, and at times run afoul of the law. Despite their overall desperation, their adventures tend to be very low stakes — mostly because they don’t really know what they want in the first place.

That description of the book may make it sound boring, but I found it anything but. It’s actually quite mesmerizing. Kerouac obviously loved America — not necessarily the institutions or the culture — but the land itself. He does a wonderful job of capturing the vast and diverse landscapes of the country his characters traverse.

I’d go so far as to say that On the Road is about America and the challenges of being a young American at a particular moment in time. What does it mean to live in a nation based on notions of freedom and endless possibilities for people who lack and don’t particularly even want direction? You can travel coast to coast and back again, philosophizing all the way, but in the end, it could all very well add up to more pursuit than happiness.

On the Road is very much a product of its time, but I think it has aged reasonably well. It’s also a young person’s story. I probably would have had a different reaction to the book when I was in my twenties than I did now in my mid-fifties. That said, it still spoke to me due the underlying humanity throughout. The characters were far from perfect, and they do a lot of dubious things, but their story is a road trip filled with pathos and a lot of heart.