On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Recently, I finally managed to finish reading On the Road by Jack Kerouac and wow did it take a lot of effort to make that happen. Usually when I'm not feeling a book I just stop, but I decided to soldier on here because it's gotten so much praise and been put on so many pedestals over the years. Personally, I very much disagree with all of it. At most, I see the book as having some historical value for the influence it had on other writers when it came out as well providing a window into the Beat community. However, it seems to celebrate a lot of crappy behavior that I found very offputting.

The book is told through the eyes of a young man in his early 20s named Sal Paradise. He's a bit directionless and has a hankering for some meaning in his life. Unfortunately, he tries to fill that void through his friend Dean Moriarty. Dean seems fun going to jazz shows all the time, hanging out with all sorts of ecclectic people, and is constantly chasing women. The book tries to portray this as a good thing and generally exciting. For the longest time a lot of people looked at all of this as a celebration of being young and spontaneous. I don't see this at all. Maybe if I was an immature 20-something I could look at things this way, but pushing 50 I take the view that the people in this book mostly needed to grow up and get a job.

They weren't spontaneous but actually impulsive. Spontaneity implies doing stuff in a way that doesn't cause problems like a bunch of friends all realizing they get a long weekend off so they decide to go on an impromptu road trip, while impulsiveness is when they all get stuck being scheduled to work that weekend but decide to call in sick to go on that road trip. One causes problems for others, the other doesn't. Dean's ideas of fun caused a lot of problems for others and its hard to look past.

Moreover, the men in this book treat women terribly. There are big, in your face examples like Dean having kids with multiple women then running off whenever he felt like it to do what he wants while leaving them high and dry. Ed Dunkel does similar with his wife Galatea (as an aside, Galatea needs to make a come back as a name). Sal played house briefly with a single mother he took a fancy to briefly, but just ditched her when the call of the road came his way again. Many of the men only cared about their own gratification in whatever form it took and the women they came across were nothing more than tools they could take off the shelf when it suited them. This isn't even getting into Dean's appetite for under aged women, which was super disgusting. Some have argued that Dean represents an unbridled manifestation of the American Dream, but looking back now he shows the importance of restraint rather than him being something that should be emulated.

As such, it rightly deserves to be more heavily criticized by modern society. There is a lot of behavior in On the Road that needs to be called out and condemned. Even if someone argues that the guys were young and immature, that shouldn't give them a free pass, as it veers into "Boys will be boys" territory which just doesn't fly in today's day and age.

To an extent, one could argue that this all reflects a segment of society yearning for something different. The book came out in a period where much of society in America was beginning to be encouraged to become obedient little Ward and June Cleavers. Very straight-laced pillar of the community types. For many, particularly men, who were coming back from WWII with a ton of trauma, this was probably very appealing. However, there was always going to be rebels in any group and the Beat Generation is how this coalesced in America. In a lot of ways it was the prototype for the Hippie Generation that followed shortly thereafter, so we can see some of the dominant sub-cultures in 20th century America get their start here. Nevertheless, it's hard to overlook the rampant misogyny here, and it speaks volumes how the boomers generally speaking didn't seem to see a need to call this out.

Keeping this in mind while critiquing the book today also makes it feel like a deserved critique of the baby boomer generation as a whole. They've been considered a very selfish generation by many, and as their generation dies off in earnest now, they will be judged more by the generations that followed them. While there are plenty among them that were thoughtful, considerate, and had a positive impact on society, there is an element of "when there's smoke, there's fire" and this criticism becomes somewhat deserved for them. The fact that their generation so broadly endorsed On the Road feels like a reflection of this selfishness. They genuinely felt the book was a celebration of spontaneity and overlooked the impulsiveness. It does seem to reflect a general mindset among the boomers. One that subsequent generations have increasingly condemned.

So, ultimately On the Road sheds light on the importance of looking at art with a modern lens. For the longest time, classics were treated as untouchable creations that needed to be put on pedestals to be praised for all time. Unfortunately, this overlooks how in the long run a creation can either be timeless or a time capsule. The former possesses universal truths and insights that transend generations, while the latter holds up a mirror to society at the time it was created. We can still look at the time capsule and see its influence on art and culture around it at the time, seeing it both as a product of and a catalyst for the society it emerged in. At the end of the day, though, it can also show aspects of society that are best left in the past. We can learn a lot from it, and the contents may help further galvanize people to avoid the bad behavior in the book, film, or whatever, but it is important to be critical of all that and not give it a free pass for being some sort of a classic.

In the end, I'm glad that I toughed it out and finished the book, as it helped me really think a lot more about how to look at art in a broader context. Not everyone is keen on doing that, and a lot of people still want to keep works from bygone eras as untouchable. I think we're at a crossroads where two camps are going to have a back and forth over this for a while before society really can get a grip on digesting older works of art. Nuance isn't a lot of people's forte so this could take a while. Even with the troubling elements in On the Road, it's still worth a read to see what all the hubbub was about. It has some very nice descriptive prose throughout that have a spontaneous jazzy free form-like quality that some might enjoy (and also take notice of when reading books by other authors from this time and beyond that were very much influenced by Kerouac, Hunter S. Thompson for example.). Hopefully in the decades to come, people will be able to better navigate discussions about books like this without them turning into polarizing shouting matches. It does look like academia is trying to get students thinking about this more, but it'll likely take years for society at large to really engage in these sort of discussions objectively.

Pennywhether

December 31, 2024