On The Road

4 Pages 1009 Words

Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. This book is essentially made up of four parts, that is, four journeys chronicled by a young writer, Sal Paradise. We also experience his feelings in both the lead-ups and follow-ups to his journeys. His first journey is when he heads west from his college life in the east. We find Sal discontented with his everyday life, he feels his college life has ‘reached the completion of its cycle’ and wants to take off, to break this circle in search of fresh experience. We see Sal’s trip partly through the eyes of Kerouac himself. The book is not totally autobiographical but it is regarded as written in ‘his [Kerouac’s] own self-image’. ‘I was a young writer and wanted to take off’ (OTR 14), we see Sal both yearning for fresh experience and also writing material. We cannot define exactly why he chooses to leave because he doesn’t seem to know that himself. It is, quite simply, the search for kicks through jeopardy and circumstance; sights, sounds and people with stories to tell (or people who are stories themselves). ‘Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me’. A big part of Sal's motivation to move can be attributed to his buddy, Dean Moriarty. Dean is described as a young Gene Autry – trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent – a side-burned hero of the snowy West'. We obtain both a strong vision from this description, that Dean is a modern American cowboy, side-burned and given the image of a young version of the cowboy singer/actor Gene Autry. We also get the first sense of how America itself moulds people into the people they are seen as (where they are from, what accent they have) and potentially the way they see themselves to be. The fact that Dean is associated with a movie actor and singer much associated with the West reveals the cycle of creating characters based on real life ...