On the Road changed the entire culture of movement when it was published in 1957- the beat movement it was associated with and the action of road travel itself. Though Kerouac published over a dozen books in his time, he will always be known for his alter ego, Sal Paradise, and sidekick, Dean Moriarty.
"Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there."
"Where we going, man?"
"I don't know but we gotta go."
Words spill across the pages like a manic drive, evoking the raw energy of eating up miles in a car across America; in search of the next place, the looming epiphany. When Sal and Dean head north for Chicago, or south to Mexico, or east to New York... you can't help but wince and laugh and hoot at their kicks. Jazz, benzadrine and furtherness keep them high and launch them into the next unknown adventure.
There are solemn moments, too, which seem to capture the soulside of America: Paradise hitchhiking through the Midwest into the night... Kerouac's cutaway paragraphs of wonderment and personal discovery... falling in love for the sake of comfort...
"I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion."
All those who have been fully on the road can read the book and knowingly nod at the run of desires, pulls and personal revelations that course through the pages. Reading it while on a hitchhiking trip will bring it a little closer to home, in fact- making garbled phrases stared at previously on a work break suddenly come alive at a truckstop outside Omaha.
Kerouac's fascination with real-life friend Neal Cassady is uncontainable as the character Dean Moriarty. And poet-friend Allen Ginsberg is thinly veiled in the book as Rollo Marx. Love it or hate it, the story contains all the adrenaline and locomotion of a true American odyssey- the darker, more physical flip side of the 40s and 50s.
If you love the thrall of the road, hitchhike or are even just curious about the Beat Generation, you've got to read this book. It might set your wheels to rolling a little further than you expected...
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