On the Road, the iconic novel by Jack Kerouac, follows the travels of a young man, Sal Paradise, back and forth across America as he moves around the country at the close of the 1940s. He is looking for fun, looking for friends, looking for work, looking for connection. He is looking for an “it” that he cannot even name.
The story particularly focuses on his interactions with his friend, Dean Moriarty, who is sometimes a travel companion, sometimes a destination, and sometimes an impetus for leaving. Dean is even more desperate to find meaning. In fact, he is pretty much clinically manic in his desire to experience life and pull deep truth from those experiences.
Sal, apparently, served in World War II but has literally nothing to say about that. He is also writing a book. However, he does not have much to say about that either. Since Sal finishes his novel well before On the Road concludes, one has to resist the idea that the book you are reading is the book he is writing. However, the story is based on Jack Kerouac’s real travels with Neal Cassady, so on the other hand, the book you are reading pretty much is the book he is writing.
In these travels, there is a great deal of driving and riding in cars, a few buses, and a fair amount of hitchhiking. There is also a lot of partying. The alcohol flows. Women, both relationships and the promise of a hookup, often motivate their travels. Friends are usually in the mix as well, especially if they can help locate women and parties. Sal sometimes works a job, but that is mostly context rather than the focus of the story. And there are vivid encounters with jazz clubs and jazz musicians. In fact, in some ways it feels like the book cares more about jazz than anything else. I am actually tempted to consider whether the whole plot should be viewed as an attempt to embody jazz improvisation through Sal and Dean. However, that sounds like a dissertation topic for somebody who actually plays a musical instrument.
Before I started reading, I had wanted Sal to be like American version of Marco Polo. I had wanted him to be voracious in what parts of America caught his attention. However, at some point during the book, I started to think that, although Sal and Dean were crisscrossing the country, they were never really seeing anything. It was similar to the reaction I have when my parents return from another state and tell me about going to Wal-Mart. While Sal and Dean keep setting out to find “it” they are basically approaching every destination in the same way.
When they discover that sex, alcohol and painting the town with friends will not provide “it” in San Francisco, they try the exact same thing in Denver. No? Well then how about Mexico City? How about New York? Should we try San Francisco again? How about Denver again? In short, it begins to seem like that famous definition of insanity.
In following their quest, I did not really object to their search for pleasure, but my visceral reaction as I closed the book was something like: “What did you think of the Rockies? Did you see the Redwoods? Did you ever go hiking? Did you tour the Field Museum? Did you see any alligators? Were you close to the Alamo? Did you visit Elitch Gardens while you were in Denver? Were there any interesting roadside attractions on Route 66? Did you try boiled peanuts?”
I understand that I am describing my own limitations in some way by saying that, but that is basically the rub. It was not easy for me to read “On the Road” on its own terms because I found myself wanting Sal and Dean to search for meaning in places they don’t look, and in which they do not even seem interested in looking. Inescapable conclusion: I would probably make a lousy beatnik.
Ultimately though, my reflections on the book did help me bring into focus the realization that I have traveled mostly as a tourist in my life. And the idea of tourism, I think, assumes that you have a place you call home. You may travel to get away from home. Or you may travel to add to your catalog of experiences. Or you may seek variety to combat the benign monotony of daily life. However, to be a tourist of other places, you still have to possess an idea of home. Wonders and curiosities are more interesting when there is some sort of normal/regular/home by which you measure them. Those sights and sounds sharpen your understanding of what home is and is not. In some sort of defining way, expanding your world requires your world to have a center.
But when Sal and Dean travel in On the Road, I finally came to accept that they are not looking for things to bring home. What they are really looking for is a place to call home, or even an idea to call home. They are looking for “it” to become that pin at the center of their experiences. They are looking for the constant by which they might process variables. In the broadest possible sense of the word, they are homeless in America. They are still “on the road” even when they reach a destination.
Thus, I came to reflect on the idea that “travel” is distinct from “wandering” and I felt like I moved closer to understanding what On the Road has to say, and what the beat generation felt, when I stopped imposing the former on Sal and Dean and started seeing them as doing the latter.