On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
RATING: 9 out of 10

I first started reading this book in August of 1998 on a flight to West Palm Beach, Florida. How might I remember that 8 years later? Well, when I opened it a few weeks back, I found my airline ticket tucked in the book, perfectly preserved for my discovery.

After I got a few pages in, I realized why the 21 year-old Shane couldn’t get through the book. I had no ability, no frame of reference, to relate to the material. 29 year-old Shane got it.

We all decided to tell our stories, but one by one, and Stan was first. “We’ve got a long way to go,” preambled Dean, “and so you must take every indulgence and deal with every single detail you can bring to mind – and still it won’t be all told.”

Although this passage doesn’t occur until much later in the book, it really encapsulates a lot of what the book is about and how it was written. On the Road has been classified as the voice of the Beat Generation of the mid-1950′s. It details Kerouac’s semi-autobiographical story of his travels with Neal Cassady across the United States. Kerouac is realized in the character of Sal Paradise and Cassady serves as the backdrop for his tragic hero Dean Moriarty.

Sal and Dean meet through mutual friend Carlo Marx (fictional version of beat poet Allen Ginsberg) and they become friends over several years. The nature of their relationship is symbiotic. Sal wants someone to listen to, Dean needs someone to talk at, to experience life with, to “dig” everything with.

But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I’ve been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, made to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

My favorite passage of the book. It really encapsulates the essence of Sal and why he follows Dean around all over the country. This is the type of thing I want to write. It sounds rhythmic out loud, yet isn’t sing-songy. It’s just perfect prose.

I found this book really intriguing. While I couldn’t identify with the lifestyle the characters live in the novel, they fascinate me. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to start hitchhiking from New York without enough money to make it to Denver. The concept of riding a flatbed truck from Omaha to Cheyenne just is insane to me. But it makes sense to Dean and Sal. They had places to go and people to “dig” and they had no cares on how to get there.