Jack Kerouac: On The Road

Above: Neal Cassady aka Dean Moriarty and Jack Kerouac aka Sal Paradise

I have a confession to make and I am truly ashamed. Once, last summer, I picked up this book and after reading two pages I dismissed it as a teenage boy angsty novel and put it aside and never picked it up again. After having a conversation with a Significant Other, I was persuaded (through intense arguing) to give it another go. So I picked it up. Re-read the pages that made me dismiss it to the dark depths of the tried-and-tested land fill and kept reading and reading and reading so much and getting so involved I’d forget where I was.

Meet Sal Paradise and the unstoppable, uncontrollable, lovable, ruthless and breathless Dean Moriarty aka Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, immortalised forever as twenty year olds grabbing a firm hold of the arteries of the America, embodied by the endless road, the endless country and their adventures of travelling ‘Further’ into the unknown. They turned their frantic, burning existence into a kind of poetry that spurned the movement of a generation to the Beat, transformed Kerouac into a living legend in his lifetime and made countless teenagers pick up a bag and ’lessgo.’

From Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac:

The spinning text, the endless sentences and the breathless excitement of music, of rhythm and of Beat, for the beautiful sake of moving has made this novel a fundamental building block in American culture. The Generation who pushed the American Dream to the limits, and sought it not through self-improvement but through living on the margins, being sexually promiscuous and putting stock in life and interpretation, experience and beatnik friendship. There is a question that this lifestyle is not sustainable for a long period of time for how long can you move? How long before your friends put down roots in their rootless existance? How long before you run out of land?

It has given me the itch and the longing to strike out and leave for no good reason but to be on the road.

Pick the book up, put all your possessions down.

And Go.

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