On the Road (Style)

Style

Setting

The characters in On the Road travel through countless cities across the United States and Mexico. Major portions of the novel take place in New York City, Denver, San Francisco, southern California, New Orleans, and Mexico. Although Sal's constant traveling gives some of his place descriptions a generic feeling, many of his depictions are vivid. For example, when he first arrives in Mexico City, he sees:

thousands of hipsters in floppy straw hats and long-lapeled jackets over bare chests padded along the main drag, some of them selling crucifixes and weed in the alleys, some of them kneeling in beat chapels next to Mexican burlesque shows in sheds. Some alleys were rubble, with open sewers, and little doors led to closet-size bars stuck in adobe walls. You had to jump over a ditch to get your drink, and in the bottom of the ditch was the ancient lake of the Aztec. You came out of the bar with your back to the wall and edged back to the street. They served coffee mixed with rum and nutmeg. Mambo blared from everywhere. Hundreds of whores lined themselves along the dark and narrow streets and their sorrowful eyes gleamed at us in the night.

However, the roads of America are the main setting of the novel. Sal hitchhikes with oddballs, rides on flatbed trucks with cowboys, and haunts bus stations with bums. Sal and Dean spend most of part two driving across the southern United States in a dilapidated Hudson that Dean buys in San Francisco. They later ride across the western prairies in a Cadillac limousine obtained through a travel bureau. Thus, the title of the novel is the most accurate description of the novel's setting.

Roman à Clef

A roman à clef (translated from French to mean "novel with a key") is a novel in which the characters are real people with fictitious names. On the Road is a thinly fictionalized account of Kerouac's life in the late 1940s. Sal Paradise is Kerouac's alter ego. Kerouac was a recently divorced writer who traveled back and forth across the country with an energetic and charismatic drifter from Denver named Neal Cassady (Dean Moriarty). Kerouac counted among his friends the wildly eccentric poet Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx), and the decadent bohemian William Burroughs (Old Bull Lee). Al Hinkle (Ed Dunkel), Carolyn Cassady (Camille Moriarty), and Henri Cru (Remi Boncoeur) are just a few of the many other friends and acquaintances of Kerouac making appearances in the novel.

Sal's travels throughout the book closely parallel Kerouac's real-life adventures. Like Sal, Kerouac fell in love with a Mexican girl in southern California; like Sal, he was forced to flee Denver because his friend stole five cars in one night. Kerouac was abandoned on the streets of San Francisco and in Mexico City by Cassady, a man he considered to be like a brother, the same way Sal was deserted by Dean. Kerouac was disappointed by Cassady in the same way that Sal is disillusioned with Dean at the end of the book. One only has to read a biography of Kerouac to find the "key" to this novel.

Anti-Hero

Dean Moriarty is a classic example of an anti-hero in American literature. Anti-heroes lack the established traits (bravery, honesty, selflessness, etc.) of traditional heroes. Although Dean is intelligent, likable, and bold like many heroes, his total rejection of responsibility marks him as an anti-hero. Dean is an inveterate thief; although he has spent most of his life in reformatories, he continues to steal throughout the novel. He is a con man who has no qualms about manipulating even his best friends. He is a womanizer who marries and plans adultery in the same sentence. He betrays friends without a second thought, as he does when he twice deserts Sal. However, Dean remains a sympathetic character because of Sal's sensitive portrait of him.

"spontaneous Prose"

Although Kerouac's later works were much more experimental in terms of style and narrative, On the Road, his second novel, was a breakthrough for him. He discovered his voice while writing the novel, and he began to develop his practice of "spontaneous prose." (He later wrote two short essays on his methods at the request of Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose.") Kerouac wanted to write in the same manner that a great bop jazz musician, such as Charlie Parker, played his instrument, and thus he invented a form of writing he called "bop prosody." Improvisation, passion, and spontaneity were the most important elements in this technique; traditional grammar and punctuation were irrelevant. Several passages in On the Road are early demonstrations of this method. A powerful example is the last paragraph in the book, an elegiac passage mourning the end of the road for Sal and Dean:

So in America, when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh-Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, and darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

This passage demonstrates Kerouac's technique. It is one long run-on sentence, with a few pauses (as a saxophone player must pause for breath), filled with vivid, poetic imagery. Kerouac continued to use these methods, sometimes with radical effects, in his later work.