What I like about Jack Kerouac's classic novel On the Road is the poetic visions that Sal has. The narrator, Sal Paradise, is a seeker who thinks he'll find the truth by traveling rough around America. Like a prophet of old, he is seeking ultimate knowledge by living in self-imposed poverty and mingling with the most downtrodden and lowly folk, people he calls "beat." In this way, he has inspiring visions of the unity of humankind and expresses them in colorful and moving language.
Sal is a graduate student and budding novelist who periodically feels a need to take a break from academia and conformity in order to experience life more intensely; he craves a life of mythic proportions. As his guide, he chooses a "wild child" type character named Dean Moriarty who was born "on the road" and more or less raised by criminals. In other words, he is totally amoral, irresponsible, and self-indulgent. This allows the flame of pure enthusiasm and intelligence to blaze forth brilliantly. Sal is bewitched by Dean and periodically risks everything to travel with him; at the same time, the novelist in Sal recognizes good material for a story.
I like Dean because I too was once entranced by a wild and crazy character who lured me into doing wild and crazy things for the sake of kicks. With her also, I sank to some low points of recklessness and poverty.
I like Dean because he is attentive to his senses and wants to "dig" everything—to see and hear every detail of a new experience, and to feel it in the depths of his soul.
Dean is a pure hedonist, like Bacchus in Roman mythology, freely indulging in sex and booze. He has wives, or ex-wives, on both coasts, and children, too. Part of him longs for the luxuries of family life, but that part is frequently overcome by a mania that drives him to travel from coast to coast by any means available.
Dean Moriarty is famously based on a real person named Neal Cassady, who was a prominent figure in both the Beat generation and the Hippie era, but Dean is bigger than Neal; he is a character of mythic proportions, "a western Kinsman of the sun." He is a figure of folk tales, like Paul Bunyan. Where Paul Bunyan had prodigious feats, like carving the Grand Canyon with his ax, Dean performs fantastic feats of driving and parking in scene after scene.
I like Dean because he is obsessed with verbalizing every nuance of his experience. In several scenes he is shown baring his soul, or trying to, through outpourings of words, whether or not he understands them. And I like Saul because he is obsessed with listening, with absorbing this avalanche of thoughts and impressions. Ultimately, it is Dean's impassioned verbiage that fascinates Sal; he wants to give his own language a similar freedom and intensity, and he achieves that in passage after passage.
I like the musical theme in On the Road. In their travels, Sal and Dean constantly seek out jazz, bebop, and blues, and Sal makes a conscientious effort not only to describe individual performances, but to summarize the entire history of these musical styles. Beyond that, he tries to write passages that invoke inspired instrumental solos. I believe he even tried to imitate a musical form called a rhapsody, in which a set of themes is worked into a rapturous outpouring of melodic sounds. While I was reading this novel, I happened to hear Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which is a compendium of American musical themes from marching bands to movie sound tracks, whipped into a satisfying lather of sound, and the similarity in purpose between Gershwin and Kerouac became apparent to me.
I can relate to the theme of traveling because, although I wasn't "born on the road" like Dean, when I was 2 1/2 my father was drafted, and my mother and I followed by car as the army transferred him from base to base for a year or more before sending him to Japan. We traveled on the cheap and picked up hitch-hikers for help with driving and gas money. From the snows of South Dakota to the heat of south Texas we traveled to be with my dad.
Moreover, as an adult I have visited nearly every major city in America, and innumerable smaller towns. Of course, I was middle-aged and well-funded, I was traveling with my husband, and we generally held fast to orderly plans, but there was still room for over-indulgence and risk-taking, and we had our ecstatic moments.
It's appropriate that Dean eventually burns out, like a dying star, losing his way and even his capacity to talk. Likewise, it's appropriate that Sal finds a good woman, escapes the tormenting fascination of aimless wandering, and writes the novel of his dreams.
