On the Road Post 2

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.

From the very first pages of On the Road, it was evident that Kerouac was a great lover of language, and this is what pulled me into the novel, making in the masterpiece that it is. It is difficult say exactly where this love is most evident, as it comes across from page one, but I would have to say that it stood out the most to me in the words Kerouac used, and his lyrical, beautiful descriptions. Throughout the book, Kerouac used words and such as lugubriously, my peremptory tone, priapus, harangues, ate vociferously, etc. where much simpler language would have sufficed. To me, this shows how much Kerouac loved to play with words, and turns the book into an even more intriguing read than in already was.

Even more than the way Kerouac plays with words, the beautiful descriptions and images that On the Road is chock-full of show Kerouac’s love of language. I was clued into this on page 2, when Kerouac described Marylou as “waiting like a longbodied emaciated Modigliani surrealist woman in a serious room,” and then was truly hit by the gorgeousness of Kerouac’s writing when I came to the passage “Tracy is a railroad town; breakmen eat surly meals in diners by the track. Trains howl away across the valley. The sun goes down long and red. All the magic names of the valley unrolled—Manteca, Mandera, all the rest. Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries. I suck my head out the window and took deep breaths of the fragrant air. It was the most beautiful of moments.” (73)

I believe it was when I was reading the line on page two that the book began to truly pull me in, and reading the passage on page seventy-three – perhaps the most beautiful thing I’ve ever read, and my favorite section of the book – that On the Road completely won me over. Kerouac’s love of language was evident everywhere in the book, and I am certain that it was not as beautiful and compelling as it is, I would not love On the Road as much as I do.