On the road has a clear autobiographical bent. The novel is clearly inspired by the experience of KEROUAC, with particular stage characters directly inspired by his knowledge. Central part of On the Road, the unforgettable MORIARTY Dean returns and Neal Cassidy, KEROUAC traveling companion in reality. It also crosses Allen GINSBERG the guise of Carlo Marx and William Burroughs embodied in the character of Old Bull Lee.
The genesis of the novel writing is emphasized: KEROUAC would have written one piece three weeks of April 1951, and on one roll of paper dozens of meters long ... Writing Mode frenzied and spontaneous which echoes one of the musical currents feverishly through the novel: the Be Bop and his frenzy, his wild improvisation, which literally permeates number of pages. KEROUAC not have to wait six years without a tedious editing work before a publisher agrees to publish his manuscript, and the original text will suffer a drastic censorship. Needless to say that these cuts are felt to reading: when we know highly dissolute lives and KEROUAC CASSIDY (homosexuality, polygamy, taken drugs of all kinds, marginality ...), one can only note with bitterness the manifest sweetening escapement PARADISE MORIARITY and their counterparts in a veiled romantic prudishness in agreement with the thought of a lenited America McCarthy 60s.
But let's go.
Almost sixty years after it was written, on the road operates an unchanged charm. At first glance, one would have some doubts as to the attraction of its subject: the wandering narrator, Sal PARADISE, through a post-war America ... But KEROUAC by his unique style is built up from the first pages a literary identity. His prose, like panting accents Be Bop, inspired musicality, distilled at the ear of the reader an inner voice that reaches the outer path, that of the road. It is an oral style, expansive, constant improvisation, which illustrates in its intrinsic freedom scrolling cities, towns, landscapes, teeming gallery of characters encountered. A freedman style of any code, emancipated and libertarian prose, like the way of life of the protagonists it staged.
Of all these protagonists, the player probably retain one. Dean's MORIARTY. The fascination it exerts on PARADISE, his companion translated into reality by the fascination of KEROUAC to Cassidy went deliciously contagious from the pen of the writer. MORIARTY is driving on the road. His line continues. Its vanishing point. He's the one that pulls and drives PARADISE towards other horizons. KEROUAC described as a kind of insatiable ogre, free electron. A devourer of life coupled with a whirlwind of energy. It seems constantly animated by an unquenchable passion. Countless his female conquests. His body as his mind are stretched to the entire satisfaction of a desire that borders on absolute and that its excess vainly trying to fill: the famous search of the "It", this peak of the spirit sometimes we reached in jazz and plunges the listener or musician in a mixture of ecstasy, exhilaration and fulfillment. The son of an alcoholic father, thrown from an early age on the road, Dean belongs to the face not visible or not blameless in America. Nonconformist, former offender, it is impossible for him to comply with a sedentary lifestyle. This is well and truly on the road, in the abundance of the movement, it finds its balance. Yet his wandering is not vein beyond to enjoy the immediacy of this specific to a nomadic life, it is routed through the will of the whereabouts of his father that he always knows alive.
Beside him, the character of Sal pales. Finally we will not know much about it after completion novel. It literally disappears before the stature of his mythical companion. Early in the novel, we find ourselves in 1947. Sal lives with her aunt. We learn that he was mobilized during the war, it touches a veteran's pension, and he just broke up with his wife. For the rest, his motives are unclear. He pretends to be a writer capitalizing on its mobile experiences to gather the material necessary for the development of a novel. That's pretty much it. Paradoxically, and with hindsight, the character of Sal does not appear to us less endearing than Dean. In reality, the pair complement Sal is the discreet shadow of the flamboyance of Dean. If the existence of Dean is closely conditioned by its turbulent past, Sal throws on the road without succumbing to any atavistic impulse. What he finds in these wanderings? Its mobility is she down to the search for pleasure? She replies modestly to a thirst for adventure? Sal he maintains movement in order to achieve or to flee? Fundamental issues raised road and its philosophical allegory. Because you can not read on the road without considering what it refers metaphorically: the intersection of aspirations, a transition area where the individual is never arrested nor socially defined, where he enjoys a privileged relationship with its direct environment (urban or natural) without any contingency, in which chance encounters and the influx of motion develop the fabric of a spontaneous present, no prospect of before or after, without past or next day. Sal, the road embodies perhaps more a refuge than a search: the temporary palliative to evil of life that was his name. And that's because the novel reveals the mechanisms of the human soul that he can still claim to exercise its appeal today.
Beyond these analytical considerations, on the road gives us more prosaically photography of an America at a given time, as a societal and geographical landscape. Indeed, the five constituent parts of the novel are travel at thousands of miles drive. America is revealed as a continent, in all its immensity. From east to west, from north to south to the tropical heat of Mexico in the last trip, places follow one another without interruption, weaving them secret correlations, claiming their specificity. At first alone, on foot or by hitchhiking, Sal then follows Dean in his wanderings driving a Cadillac and a Ford. The reader discovers the dark areas of large capitals, his unhealthy eating houses, its smoky bars where occur virtuosos of jazz, where the effervescent music coagulates plunging into crowds owls in a trance. The Be Bop is the counterpoint to this geographical and cultural mix. It inculcates the novel breath. The style of marries KEROUAC also much pace as accents. On the road since proceeds of synaesthesia: his sentences meander and modulate, freed from all shackles, colored like the convolutions of a saxophone phrasing, copper as the trajectories of the beam routes that unfold in trees throughout the territory US to trace the book-partition of a multiple society. Music, style, lifestyle: everything is connected and sealed in the literary unity of the novel. This is probably his greatest achievement.
