On the Road-Post 2

Can you tell Kerouac loved language? Reflect on where in the novel this love of language is most evident and explore its impact on the telling of the story.

I would almost say that words should be a stumbling-block for Kerouac, limiting his options in a not very On-the-Road way, but even when it came to the points where he’s in his element, and Paradise is out living with wild abandon, you know that he always had the perfect word on the tip of his tongue, invented on-the-spot or not. This sort of comfortableness with words and how he uses them is his love of language, how because it’s set up spatially and with such a huge momentum, it can’t truly ramble. The miracle is that it keeps pace with the book, he never has to stop and restructure a scene so that he can use some new phrase that rings a little false, and you can feel this huge trust he has in the story to hold everything he has to say, and that not one of these spontaneous sentences will take away from an experience that seems so sacred to him. He gets so caught up in it, but that never slows the book down, because these words have all become ideas that the story is structured around. Moriarty plays an incredible role as a constant synthesizer for their life on the road.

I think that his love of language is most apparent where he manages to encapsulate all the hows and whys of On the Road, those knockout sentences where you think you could actually understand what Kerouac and Cassady were all about, their thoughts behind beliefs backing decisions leading up to their own ideas of what they wanted and where they wanted to be in that moment, everything that got them out on the road and kept them going and going. You still have to think each through for yourself, but there’s no real way you can come up with something that would make you not want to be there. For example: “What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their speck dispersing?-- it’s the too-huge world vaulting us in, and it’s goodbye.” (p. 255) and “... and all things tied together all over like rain connecting everybody the world over by chain touch.” (p.239) In these, Cassady/Moriarty is so much more than a petty thief/womanizer who leaves cripples out in the rain, starts arguments, and contradicts himself every paragraph and Kerouac is something beyond an alcoholic who can’t quite leave his mother’s house. They make you forget about the glossing-over and editing and they make the story stick, they make Kerouac “the voice of a generation” and the “King of Beat” and they effectively eliminate any real argument for why you shouldn’t get out on the road too.