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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• Part Three

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

• Part Four

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

• Part Four (Mexico City)

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

• Throughout

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