On The Road
"I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him."Jack Kerouac's ground breaking novel On The Road was the birth place of the beatnik generation. The book is autobiographical with Sal (Jack Kerouac) Paradise and Dean (Neal Cassedy) Moriarty and their series of trips across America. Beatnik's were famous madmen. They drank and wrote poetry and freaked out to bebop records. They were jazz poet's who loved the blues and made the most of life whilst they were young. Kerouac not only began the beat generation, but captured it's essence perfectly in this novel.
On The Road is written in first person narrative, which allowed me to make a real connection with Sal's emotions and views. Despite this it didn't detract from the emotions of other characters. All the other characters are seen with such realism through Dean's eyes that it didn't strike me as being biased or one sided on Sal's part letting me develop my own feelings towards the characters regardless of Sal's thoughts.
For this particular novel I think it's important to point out that my favourite character was Dean Moriarty, who is a character that I'd usually hate. Throughout the novel Dean does everything wrong. He has failed marriages, several children that he doesn't see, he abandons his friends, wives and girlfriends. He gets drunk and he has a tendency to stay up all night and drive like a first class mental patient. But his character is the embodiment of everything I want to be. He's a lover, a traveller, a philosopher, and on top of it all he's widely impulsive and doesn't care for the consequences. Dean is what everyone wants to be but is too scared to become.
All in all I love this book, and it will travel with me like Sal did with Dean.
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