This is not a book, it is a state of mind. Indeed, let it be said, Kerouac did not write a story. At the beginning we are tempted to follow the adventures of the two main fellows, Sal Paradise alias Jack Kerouac and Dean Moriarty alias Neal Cassady (in the original roll, Kerouac did not even bother to change the real names of the protagonists, thus Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and others appear directly under their real identities).
But after a while the story seems to slip and us with it and then, suddenly, bang! We realize that the story has absolutely no interest, that the only thing that takes precedence is the state of mind, the "Mood" to use a jazz term so specific to Kerouac's writing. Either it takes and it's magic, or it doesn't and it's a cruel disappointment to the reader. You will have understood that for me it took, perhaps because I too read it on the road, a long time ago, at the wheel of a small jester car with Bob Dylan full blast in my ears, in a peregrination between the North Cape and the Sahara, aimless and without motive like the two protagonists and about the same age as them.
When it takes, we never come out completely unscathed, there is a before and an after Kerouac. The road takes on a whole new meaning because this book is nothing less than another way of seeing life.
It becomes metaphysics, a philosophy of life like Hermann Hesse (which will be developed later in the celest trochards) away like this all the time, to abandon your children and companions like Dean does? Would it make any difference, at the hour of the last breath, not to have abandoned them?
This book has the merit of existing and of blowing a different vision of life than utilitarianism. Do things that are useless, just to experience them, just for the fleeting sensation they give you. (i dont have the place in this to finish the review sadly lol)
The book came out in 1957, a memorable year in more ways than one, but in particular for the sending into space of the famous Soviet artificial satellite named Sputnik. It did not take more for a journalist to imagine the term "beatnik" to qualify these kinds of ragged free electrons who are on the move.
Kerouac himself explained in an interview that the term "beat" referred according to him to three concepts combined: the first comes from the black populations of the New York subway, literally the "beaten", forgotten by the American dream, languishing in misery and the lack of perspective, but characterized by a sort of recklessness, good humor and constant brotherhood, coupled with a serious tendency to chant for a yes for a no.
The second comes from the notion of pulsation, of "beating", a term which evokes the heart, but also and especially the rhythm of jazz, of which the spontaneous prose of Kerouac wants to be the literary equivalent of the improvisations specific to this music. Finally, let's not forget that Kerouac was French-speaking and that French was even his mother tongue and therefore that the term "beat" also echoes the French term "béatitude" in its sense of simple and natural wonder at the spectacle of the nature (human or encountered on the road).
Thus, the author designated his generation (those who made 39-45 and came back a little lost) as the "beat generation", a nod to the no less famous "lost generation" of 14 -18, so well described by DH Lawrence in The Lover of Lady Chatterley and of which the writer Ernest Hemingway is an archetype.
so yeah For comparison, if you have the chance, read this other "On the Road" which is Che Guevara's Motorcycle Travel and you will see a whole different effect of traveling aimlessly. In a way, it's the same story, the same protagonists, but luck has it that they didn't come across the same reality and that it didn't have the same effects on them. This generates another metaphysics that it is not uninteresting to confront.
Finally, is it useful to specify that the "On the road" of Kerouac is in the lineage of the American novels which draw their origin from the monument of Herman Melville, Moby Dick. I want the first and the last page of the novel as proof. In the first, the hero looks like Ishmaël de Melville, and in the last, Kerouac compares America to a giant, elongated belly, a barely concealed allusion to the big killer whale.
end of the long review.
