On the Road

By Jack Kerouac

Mythicized by the scroll which Kerouac first typed out the story, On the Road in many ways mythicizes "American freedom" and the beat lifestyle. Kerouac rambles through tale after tale - most based off of real events he experienced with his friends and contemporaries - about drugs, sex and life on the road. Everything is hard, but everything is fun and OK. Dean Moriarty, perhaps both the protagonist and antagonist, continually comes back into Sal's (Kerouac's analogue) life to stir things up, and Sal continues to just go along with it. Anyway, why not? Dean always has some scheme, and although he is often extremely morally questionable, is always a guarantee for a grand experience where living can really happen. 

Much like the Road, the writing in this book extends into the horizon every chance Kerouac gets. A paragraph will start talking about a meeting with a cute girl at a bar and end hundreds of words later about the true nature of time. And while the run-on sentences are everywhere, I was no less captivated and moved by each passage. Kerouac, as I first learned in Dharma Bums, has a way with prose that's unequaled. He can describe a girl or sunset or fight and make you feel nostalgic about something you've never even experienced! (4/16/2021).