On the Road

On the Road has been interpreted, debated over and, ironically enough, turned into an engine of capitalism in the fifty some years since it was published. This clash of interpretations is because Kerouac wasn’t writing an adventure story, as it is often read, but a character study of one of the most interesting individuals in modern literature.

While ostensibly the story of Sal Paradise’s adventures across North America, the real focus of the book is on the other central character Dean Moriarty. Sal is fascinated, almost obsessively, with Dean as soon as he meets him. To those who know him only casually, Dean seems like a conman. He works and fudges his way towards enough money to sustain drinking, womanizing and, above all, traveling. All the while he leaves behind a string of heartbroken women and fatherless children across the US. And yet this conman fascinates the more responsible Sal so much that he spends several years of his life following him around trying to understand how Dean seems to know the secret of life.

And, according to the author, Dean really does know the secret, or better put, lack thereof. Dean simply lives life in the moment. He isn’t moral and he isn’t immoral. He is more amoral-he simply doesn’t think in those categories. He isn’t religious but he has a strange religious sense about him. More Eastern than Western he sees the life of work, marriage and responsibility as mostly an illusion to be fled from.

This attitude towards life, this simply to be fully alive every second, can’t be put into so many words. That’s why Dean is forever talking about someone getting IT. IT is simply this sense of living at its utmost that seems like such a banal insight unless expressed as lived in a person like Dean Moriarty.

And this understanding of life comes with an understandable sadness since human life is always finite. Hence the dichotomy between Dean fully feeling IT and his often expressed melancholy.

To be honest, I don’t share Kerouac’s enamor with Dean Moriarty. But then I’m married, work in an office and have a mortgage to meet. Perhaps Kerouac wouldn’t have been so enamored with my choices.

Regardless, the book is a deserved classic for espousing a way of life that people around the world aspire to attain. One can condemn, belittle or otherwise reject this life but it rarely has been better sold. A must read for all who want to understand the type of life many modern people try to imitate.

Or maybe there was no editor? Random typos, periods, and commas ruin the reading experience, although the words are all here. Go find a used earlier version for a better reading experience.