On The Road

On The Road is not only a description of the ethos of the 'Beat' generation. It is a wild brawl of a story, as applicable now as was then and will, till the final man falls from the earth and makes his great, sad journey to somewhere, nowhere, be an example of how much life holds and drops and scoops back up again. It's like Kerouac' s conversations with himself and how these actually extend themselves into the actual living, heaving world. SENSATIONAL!!! Life's in the trimmings, the details, Jack would say. It's every second that passes, rushing or whispering, slurring or staggering. No pretending. Every thing is what it is, don't fool yourself-EVER, don't grab anybody else's coattails and let them drag you on their ride, ride your own current, man, follow it like a rope to the exit of a dark, cold room. Take it and wrestle with it's direction and let it flow. Let every moment be that moment, the next moment is later, now, then -the great giddiness and spins and loops of a half-crazed mind. Only half-crazy, if you can see the other world that lies in your heart and eyes but useable and untrackable but definite and unique and readable on faces, sometimes sniffable in the air, ay those who know will know- the poets-and everyone knows. Must be crazy to see these things -the mass of everything in existence hanging on the now ,your now, everybody's now. Wild and free (overused) & fruitless, sometimes heartless and always moving, travelling, rolling, going somewhere, gotta do something, even if it's nothing it must be something, anything. So I think they (The Beats) all see this THIS and know it, each intimate in his or her own way with it. Knowing this they simply want to see what can occur, what is possible, what feelings can be gotten, mined from life. And so they wail, wail, wail, rushing for the something, the anything that waits for them in the unseeable future, down the road. 'I've just found the beat literary, through On The Road. And when I read it I could feel the cotton fields, all the smoky jazz bars and, most of all, the highway just crossing in my eyes and I haven't even visited in America (I'm Finnish). Thank You Mr. Kerouac. You showed me the way.'

On The Road

Scritto fra il 1948 ed il 1951 , ma pubblicato solo nel 1957 , segna il periodo più prolifico di Kerouac ed il suo maggiore successo. On the road è un romanzo non convenzionale (non c'è un vero e proprio impianto narrativo). Divenne in breve tempo l'emblema della Beat Generation. I personaggi di On the road vivono come vagabondi , si ubriacano di alcol e droga , passano da un'automobile all'altra schiacciando l'acceleratore fino a bruciarsi le suole delle scarpe e sfogano la loro energia , la loro avidità di vita , di ansia , in un'intensità spesso di difficile comprensione. La strada diviene solo lo sfondo dove queste anime senza pace vivono , e spesso sono proprio le variegate strade d'America il personaggio principale della storia. Strade che i personaggi della storia percorrono in lungo e in largo , senza mai fermarsi per troppo tempo , inseguendo nuove emozioni e nuovi itinerari in un vortice continuo di asfalto , locali , alcol e musica. Ne viene fuori un ritratto dell' America degli anni cinquanta , vissuta da un gruppo di folli ragazzi beatniks insofferenti ad ogni regola o etichetta. L'idea stessa del viaggio come esperienza catartica e liberatrice trova in Kerouac il suo più grande narratore.

On The Road 1957

'On the Road' was published in 1957. It is disturbing and powerful, but not over done, bursting with juvenile grace, distraught depravity, serious questions and severe hangovers, cheap philosophy and smoking jalopies. It has such unaffected brilliance and is written with such musical prose that the unanimously enthusiastic critics described Kerouac as the 'first oral novelist of American literature' A stunning success that the handsome Jack would never recover from. Squandering his king size royalties on ridiculous trips or drowning them in a bottle drinking in his room; like a nasty sullen Buddha, Kerouac burnt himself out writing a series of books, each one more similar to the last, though never losing the charm and sensuality that even this final bitterness could not destroy ('The Celestial Tramps','Big Sur', 'Satori in Paris' are easier to digest today than Henry Miller's trilogy, no worse in any event than the repetitiveness of Charles Bukowski, 'his presumptuous heir)