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On the Road: Kerouac's Alternate American Dream Essay On the Road: Kerouac's Alternate American Dream. Jack Kerouac was one of a group of young men who, immediately after the Second World War, protested against what they saw as the blandness, conformity and lack of cultural purpose of middle-class life in America. The priorities of people of their age, in the mainstream of society, were to get married, to move the suburbs, to have children and to accumulate wealth and possessions. Jack Kerouac and his friends consciously rejected this pursuit of stability and instead looked elsewhere for personal fulfillment. They were the Beats, the pioneers of a counterculture that came to be known as the Beat Generation. The Beats saw mainstream life as a prison. They wanted freedom, the freedom to pick up and go at a moments notice. This search for the true meaning of life was given a literary voice in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, written in 1951 but not published until 1957. This essay will investigate some of the aspects of the novel that make it a forceful and complex rejection of the white middle class American dream. Beginning in the winter of 1947 Jack Kerouac undertook a series of journeys by car across the United States and finally into Mexico that he then wrote about in On the Road. The novel conveys a feeling of constant motion, a frenetic search for meaning in an America that is very different from the middle class ideal. Sal Paradise, the narrator of the story, describes an America of constantly changing landscapes peopled by a multitude of colourful characters. Sal Paradise's America is an America where the only commitment seems to be to the immediate gratification found in fast cars, sex, drugs and jazz. Sal's idol and travelling companion is Dean Moriarty, a reckless and hyperactive womanizer who, to Sal, is the physical embodiment of freedom. In On the Road, Kerouac offers a new vision of America right from the first sentence On the Road: Kerouac's Alternate American Dream Essay

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On the Road: Kerouac's Alternate American Dream Essay

when Sal Paradise says, "I first met Dean right after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with a miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead" (Kerouac 1). Thus begins Sal's life on the road and his search for a more meaningful, authentic life. He has failed to find authenticity in mainstream society but hopes to find it on society's fringes. In the novel, Sal's search for authenticity begins and ends with his association with Dean Moriarty. His highly charged friendship with Dean Moriarty continues throughout the novel but finally ends with a denouement in Mexico City. In his frenetic search for authenticity, Sal encounters a continuous progression of marginalized people that include not only Dean's friends and sexual partners but also hobos, migratory farm workers and black jazz musicians. Sal feels that all these people have authenticity because they all value the immediate over the traditional expectations of mainstream society. Kerouac defines the intense moment or "It" as the culmination of the immediate. "It" is well illustrated when Sal and Dean, together with a group of their Beat friends, go to a wild party at the house of Rollo Greb on Long Island, and Dean enthuses about Rollo saying, "if you go like him all the time you'll finally get it." "Get what"" "It! It! I'll tell you - now no time, we have no time now" (127). Later in the novel, "It" is represented by the high C's reached by a black tenor saxophone player " blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea" (197). The Beats, having chosen to divorce themselves from mainstream society, saw a parallel between themselves and the African Americans who had also been marginalized by white middle class society. This affinity, that the Beats felt they had with the blacks and black culture, manifested itself primarily in their enthusiastic support of bebop jazz. Bebop was a form of jazz that had developed immediately after the Second World War. Professional black musicians, having become extremely frustrated with mainstream jazz, had developed a new improvisational form that they called bebop. This rejection, by black musicians, of the white middle class standard of American music neatly parallels Kerouac's rejection of American society as a whole. Mainstream jazz, or swing as it was popularly called, was a pasteurized version of the black "hot" jazz of the 1930's that reached its peak of development with the orchestras On the Road: Kerouac's Alternate American Dream Essay

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of Duke Ellington and Count Basie. This "hot" jazz was appropriated by segregated, wholly white orchestras, typified by the most popular of them, the Glenn Miller Orchestra, who fine-tuned the hot jazz into swing. Swing became enormously popular in white America during the Second World War but it's smooth formulistic style held little appeal to black musicians and black audiences. It was black jazz musicians, such as Dizzie Gillespie and Charlie Parker, both mentioned by Kerouac in On the Road, that not only revitalized jazz but also re-established its sense of freedom. It was the sense of freedom in bebop that made it so important to the Beats as described by Sal when he says, "as I sat there listening to that sound of the night which bop had come to represent to all of us I thought about all my friends from one end of the country to the other" (12). David Halberstam in his book The Fifties offers a revealing insight into Kerouac's early life. Jack Kerouac was born into a poor family of French Canadian descent in Lowell Massachusetts in 1922. Growing up, his family spoke French as their first language, which made Kerouac's schooling difficult. This, plus the added difficulties of a poverty stricken and oppressively strict Catholic upbringing, go a long way towards explaining why Kerouac rebelled against the mainstream of society and became a spokesman for the new counterculture. Halberstam tells us, however, that Kerouac was a "divided man " (300). On the one hand a Beat, a freedom loving man of the road, but on the other, a man that couldn't escape the personal boundaries that were the result of his overly strict and repressive upbringing. Maybe his personal struggle with commitment contributes to the fact that Kerouac's protagonist in On the Road, Sal, never fully commits himself to the supposed freedom of the Beat lifestyle and always returns to the stability of his aunt's house after every road trip. "At dawn I got my New York bus and said good-by to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we'd never see one another again and we didn't care" (178). Although Sal Paradise interacts with a myriad of characters in On the Road such as Carlo Marx, Marylou, Ed Dunkel, Old Bull Lee, Slim Galliard and Stan Shephard, the only other really close relationship, besides the one that he has with Dean Moriarty, is On the Road: Kerouac's Alternate American Dream Essay

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the one that he has with Terry, who is " the cutest little Mexican girl in slacks" (Kerouac 81). Sal's affair with Terry allows him access to the world of the migrant farm worker. To financially support the relationship Sal gets a job picking cotton. It is during this period that Sal is actually able to fraternize and identify with people that are truly disenfranchised, the Mexican field workers. This is well illustrated when Sal describes the night that "the Okies went mad in the roadhouse and tied a man to a tree and beat him to a pulp with sticks.... From then on, I carried a big stick with me in case they got the idea that we Mexicans were fouling up their trailer camp (98). Here Sal is identifying himself as a Mexican when ironically, as a white American; he is closer, culturally and nationally, to the Okies, a group name given to the poor white migrant farmers of the time. Sal's self imposed change of ethnicity is short lived however, because a few days later, money arrives from his aunt giving Sal the means to escape back to New York; and he tells Terry that he has to leave but will see her when she gets to New York knowing full well that he will never see her again (101). The void, left by Kerouac's apparent rejection of everything that white middle class American society stood for, begged to be filled by something else. That something could only be found by relentless searching. In this sense, Kerouac's novel On the Road is a modern literary rendition of the medieval search for the Holy Grail. The novel describes not only a search for alternate spiritual values but also a search for a personal identity that had been lost or maybe had never even existed in the first place. In On the Road, the narrator, Sal Paradise, recounts the details of a search that, ultimately, is not rewarded. Sal's infatuation with Dean Moriarty leads him only to a parting of the ways. When he is abandoned by Dean, whilst seriously ill in Mexico, Sal finally realizes what Dean really stands for. Sal, at last, comes to the understanding that his friend's philosophy is based on the premise that personal authenticity requires the complete abandonment of personal ties. Dean believes that all your energy must be focussed on obtaining your own kicks to the exclusion of everyone else. As Sal says in the final paragraph of the novel, " I realized what a rat he was" (302).


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