On the Road

Summary

On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy. The novel is divided into five parts. In Part One Sal sets out alone for the West, hitchhiking and riding buses to Denver, where he joins Dean and their poet friend Carlo Marx, and then to San Francisco, where he works briefly as a guard at a barracks camp for departing seamen. Heading south, he falls in with Terry, a young Mexican-American woman, and lives with her and her small son for a few weeks picking cotton in the San Joaquin Valley before returning east. In Part Two Dean arrives at Christmas with his first wife Marylou and their friend Ed Dunkel; they drive Sal to New York, then south to visit the drug-taking writer Old Bull Lee outside New Orleans, and on to San Francisco, where Dean abandons Sal and Marylou with no money. In Part Three Sal goes west again and finds Dean living with his second wife Camille, his thumb bandaged after an injury that became infected. Sal and Dean cross the country together, delivering a Cadillac to Chicago at reckless speed, and Dean settles in New York with a new partner, Inez. In Part Four Sal, Dean and a friend, Stan Shephard, drive from Denver to Mexico. They smoke marijuana with a young local, spend a frenzied afternoon in a brothel, and reach Mexico City, where Sal falls ill with fever and dysentery. Dean, having obtained a Mexican divorce, leaves him there to return to Camille. In the brief Part Five Sal, now in love with a woman named Laura, is visited once more by Dean, who has crossed the continent to see him. Sal, leaving with friends for a concert, cannot take Dean along, and Dean walks off alone into the cold New York night. The book ends with Sal sitting on a river pier at sunset, thinking of the vast country to the west and of Dean Moriarty. Beneath its exuberance the novel is a study of restlessness, friendship and disappointment: the ecstatic search for 'it' keeps colliding with abandoned wives, unpaid debts and exhaustion, and Sal's admiration for Dean is shadowed by growing awareness of the cost of Dean's freedom to everyone around him.

Plot or Argument

• Part One (1947): first trip west

  Sal hitchhikes to Denver, meets Dean and Carlo Marx, goes on to San Francisco to work with his friend Remi Boncoeur, then drifts south to Los Angeles and the cotton fields with Terry before returning to New Jersey.

• Part Two (1948–49): Dean comes east

  Dean, Marylou and Ed Dunkel collect Sal from Virginia; the group shuttles to New York, visits Old Bull Lee near New Orleans, and drives on to San Francisco, where Dean abandons Sal and Marylou.

• Part Three (1949): across the country together

  Sal finds Dean in San Francisco, estranged from Camille and nursing an infected thumb. The two ride to Denver and then rush a Cadillac to Chicago; Dean settles in New York with Inez.

• Part Four (1950): Mexico

  Sal, Dean and Stan Shephard drive south through Texas into Mexico. The landscape and people strike Sal as a revelation; marijuana and a brothel episode follow. In Mexico City Sal falls ill and Dean leaves him.

• Part Five: parting

  Dean crosses the country to see Sal, who is settling down with Laura. Sal leaves for a concert without him, and the novel closes on a lyrical meditation on America and Dean.

Characters

• Sal Paradise, narrator

  Aspiring writer from New Jersey, modelled on Kerouac, who alternates between admiration for Dean and loneliness on the road.

• Dean Moriarty, central figure

  Charismatic, impulsive Denver drifter, modelled on Neal Cassady, whose energy drives the journeys and whose irresponsibility damages those around him.

• Carlo Marx, poet friend

  Intense, visionary poet modelled on Allen Ginsberg.

• Old Bull Lee, writer and host near New Orleans

  Erudite, drug-using eccentric modelled on William S. Burroughs.

• Marylou, Dean's first wife

  Young woman who travels with Dean and Sal and is abandoned with Sal in San Francisco.

• Camille, Dean's second wife

  San Francisco wife with whom Dean has children and whom he repeatedly leaves.

• Terry, Sal's companion in California

  Young Mexican-American mother with whom Sal lives briefly, picking cotton.

• Remi Boncoeur, Sal's friend in San Francisco

  Old school friend who finds Sal a job as a guard.

• Stan Shephard, travel companion

  Denver friend who goes with Sal and Dean to Mexico.

Lessons

• Freedom has costs that others pay

  Dean's restlessness is exhilarating to Sal, but the novel keeps showing the wives, children and friends left behind. Read closely, the book is as much about the casualties of freedom as its pleasures.

  • Which of Dean's abandonments does Sal judge, and which does he excuse?
  • Does Galatea Dunkel's rebuke of Dean in Part Three change how you read him?
  • Is Sal's final memory of Dean an act of love or of mourning?

• The search for intensity

  Sal and Dean pursue moments of heightened experience through jazz, speed, sex and drugs. The book asks whether such intensity can be sustained or whether it inevitably burns out into exhaustion and illness.

  • What does 'it' mean for Dean, and does he ever find it?
  • How does the novel connect jazz improvisation with its own style?

• America as landscape and myth

  The repeated crossings make the continent itself a character. Kerouac mixes reverence for the land with an idealizing view of working people, migrant laborers, Black Americans, and Mexicans, whom Sal imagines as freer and more alive than his own restless circle.

  • How does Sal describe the people he meets in the cotton fields and in Mexico?
  • What does Sal hope to find in lives unlike his own, and does the novel let him find it?

Context

The novel records postwar America: the new highway culture, cheap cars, bebop jazz, a booming economy and a younger generation alienated from conformity. Its characters are thinly veiled portraits of the circle later called the Beat Generation, including Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs.

Composition

Kerouac drafted the novel in a famous burst in April 1951, typing continuously on a long roll of taped-together paper (the 'scroll'). Publishers rejected it for years; after substantial revision and the substitution of pseudonyms for real names, Viking published it in September 1957. The original scroll text was published in 2007.

Reception

A rapturous New York Times review by Gilbert Millstein made the book an instant sensation, while other critics dismissed it; Truman Capote's quip that it was 'typing' rather than writing became notorious. It shaped the counterculture of the 1960s and remains a touchstone of American road literature.

Comparisons

• in-patagonia

  Both are restless travel narratives built from episodes and encounters, but Chatwin's sparse, ironic vignettes contrast sharply with Kerouac's breathless confessional flow.

• whitman-complete-poems

  Kerouac's long catalogues of American places and people descend from Whitman's 'Song of the Open Road' and 'Song of Myself'; both mythologize the continent and the democratic crowd.

• don-quixote

  Sal and Dean are a picaresque pair like Sancho and the Don: a watcher and an enthusiast whose road adventures expose the gap between fantasy and the world.

• humboldts-gift

  Bellow's narrator memorializes a brilliant, self-destructive poet-friend much as Sal memorializes Dean; both novels weigh charisma against damage.

• the-odyssey

  Both are journey narratives organized around departure and return, though Sal's returns lead to no settled home.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The direction of each journey in the five parts: west in Part One, back and forth in Parts Two and Three, south to Mexico in Part Four. Notice how the mood changes with the direction.
• Sal's weeks with Terry and her son in the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley in Part One, the one time he tries to live a working, settled life, and why he leaves.
• The scene in Part Three when Galatea Dunkel and the women in a San Francisco apartment confront Dean about his selfishness, and Sal's response to their charge.
• The moments when Dean leaves people behind: Sal and Marylou in San Francisco in Part Two, and Sal sick with fever in Mexico City in Part Four.
• The end of Part Five, when Sal leaves for a concert without Dean, and the final scene on the river pier at sunset looking west across the country.

Key terms and names

Sal Paradise

The narrator, a young writer from New Jersey who lives with his aunt between journeys. His admiration for Dean and his growing doubt about him shape the whole book.

Dean Moriarty

The restless young man from Denver whose energy drives the trips. Sal sees him as joyful and even holy in his freedom while he wrecks marriages and leaves friends stranded.

Beat Generation

The name for Kerouac's circle of young writers and drifters. Kerouac later said the word beat meant both worn out and, in his Catholic sense, beatific.

IT

The intense moment Dean and Sal seek, especially in jazz, when time seems to stop and everything is understood. The book never shows them able to keep it.

Old Bull Lee

The learned, drug-using writer whom the travellers visit near New Orleans in Part Two. His household, given over to drugs and idleness, shows where the young men's freedom can lead.

The scroll

The single long roll of taped paper on which Kerouac typed a first draft in 1951. It reflects his aim of a continuous, unbroken flow of sentences.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension Where does Sal travel in Part One, and what does he do during his time with Terry in California?
2. Comprehension What happens when Dean leaves Sal and Marylou in San Francisco in Part Two?
3. Comprehension What happens to Sal in Mexico City in Part Four, and what does Dean do?
4. Interpretation When Galatea Dunkel accuses Dean of caring only for himself, Sal defends him. Is Sal's defense convincing, and does the rest of the novel bear it out?
5. Interpretation Sal and Dean look for IT in jazz, speed and the open road. Why does the experience never last, and what does the book suggest they are really searching for?
6. Interpretation Why does Sal leave Dean behind in Part Five? Is this a betrayal of their friendship, or a sign that Sal has grown?
7. Big Question Is restlessness a sign of a hunger that the road can satisfy, or of a hunger that no place on earth can satisfy?

Faith Connections

• Luke 15:11-32 (Scripture)

  The younger son goes into a far country, spends everything, and finally comes to himself and returns to his father. Sal and Dean's journeys follow the first half of this story many times over, and the parable lets readers ask what a true homecoming would mean for them.

• Ecclesiastes 1:5-8 (Scripture)

  The Preacher watches the sun rise and set and the wind circle back again, and says the eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear with hearing. The novel's repeated crossings of the continent fit this picture of motion that never reaches rest.

• Hebrews 11:13-16 (Scripture)

  The patriarchs confess themselves strangers and pilgrims on earth, seeking a better country. Sal's longing for the West and for Mexico can be read beside this account of pilgrims whose desire for a homeland points beyond any map.

• Augustine, Confessions I.1 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine says that God made us for himself and our heart is restless until it rests in him. The ceaseless movement of Sal and Dean, and the sense of loss at the end, make this line a natural question to bring to the book.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Sal finds ordinary life in postwar America confining, and Dean seems to embody a joyful freedom that breaks through it by constant movement and intense experience. On the road Sal does find moments of beauty and fellowship. Yet each intense moment fades, and Dean's freedom costs his wives, children and friends dearly. Therefore the novel, while celebrating the search, shows that the road alone cannot give the rest and belonging its travellers seek, and Sal ends at the river looking west, alone with his memory of Dean.

Rhetorical device: polysyndeton. Kerouac's long sentences link clause after clause with and, especially in the driving scenes and in the closing paragraph of Part Five, which moves across the whole continent in one breath. The piled-up clauses imitate the speed and restlessness of the journeys.

Debate: Resolved: Sal is right to leave Dean behind at the end of the novel.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace Sal's view of Dean from their first meeting in Part One to their parting in Part Five. Argue whether Sal's admiration changes into judgment, into grief, or into something else, using at least three specific episodes.

Comparison with The Odyssey: Odysseus travels for years to return to Ithaca and Penelope, while Sal and Dean cross the continent again and again with no home they wish to reach. Compare how each journey is shaped by its end, and argue what the comparison reveals about the place of home in a good life.

Medical Lens

The novel is a period document of mid-century recreational drug use: Benzedrine (amphetamine) inhalers, marijuana, heavy drinking and the near-total sleeplessness of the long drives. Old Bull Lee's household is shown in the grip of opiate and other drug habits. Dean's relentless talking, sleeplessness and impulsivity are sometimes read by modern critics as hypomanic, but such readings are speculative; Kerouac presents him as a holy fool, and the real Neal Cassady's life should not be diagnosed from a novel. Sal's illness in Mexico City and Dean's infected thumb are glimpses of how little medical care this itinerant life allowed. Kerouac's own death from alcohol-related haemorrhage gives the book's celebration of drink a darker afterlife.

• Part Two

  Visit to Old Bull Lee's household near New Orleans, where drug use (including Benzedrine and opiates) is part of daily life.

  AddictionOpium Laudanum
• Part Three

  Dean's injured thumb becomes infected and is treated, a recurring image of his self-inflicted damage.

  Fever Infection
• Part Four

  Driving into Mexico, the companions smoke marijuana with a local youth and experience the landscape in an altered state.

  HallucinogensAltered States
• Part Four (Mexico City)

  Sal falls ill with fever and dysentery and is left behind by Dean.

  Fever InfectionNursing Caregiving
• Throughout

  Marathon drives, all-night jazz clubs and continuous drinking, with sleep deprivation treated as a kind of ecstasy.

  Sleep InsomniaAlcoholMania

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Retell the San Francisco abandonment in Part Two from Marylou's point of view.

• Essay

  Is Dean Moriarty a hero, a casualty or a predator? Use specific episodes to argue your view.

• Classroom

  Map the novel's journeys on a US map and discuss how the direction of travel (west, east, south) changes the mood of each part.

Further Reading

• The Dharma Bums, Jack Kerouac

• Howl and Other Poems, Allen Ginsberg

  Ginsberg's 1956 collection, written by the original of Carlo Marx.

• Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs

  By the original of Old Bull Lee; a central text of drug literature.

• Junky, William S. Burroughs

  First-person account of 1940s opiate addiction.

• Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac, Gerald Nicosia