In the end Leland’s book begins to feel as if it’s missing the road for the gravel and tar. What matters about “On the Road” is the book’s raw energy yoked to its sense of promise in “all that raw land,” the shove it offers to get out of one’s own chair and see what lies over the horizon. As Dean says on reaching San Francisco: “Wow! Made it! Just enough gas! Give me water! No more land! We can’t go any further ’cause there ain’t no more land!” And on heading back east: “Let’s go, let’s not stop ”” go now! Yes!” The book is a hymn to purposelessness, an antidote to what John Fowles once decried as our modern “addiction to finding a reason, a function, a quantifiable yield” in everything we do.
Above all, “On the Road” matters for its music: its plaintive, restless hum. In it, Kerouac perfected a melancholy optimism and a yearning for solace a thousand times richer and subtler than the mournful sap that drips down from so many contemporary American films and novels. It’s the lovely ache in the writing of Sherwood Anderson and Arthur Miller, in the cracked voices of Jeff Tweedy and Paul Westerberg. This is the great, lasting appeal of “On the Road,” the reason it will continue to matter to readers for another half-century and more. It’s the reason I’m glad I’ve got another copy, its pages already creased and its spine broken ”” and it’s the reason I won’t be giving this one away.
Is purposeless what people really want? Does that way lead to REAL freedom? Just asking. Read it all–KSH..
Is it purposelessnes that people really want?
Occasionally . . . it helps question our purposes and reasserts the truth that not everything we do must have a concious meaning. Most things, yest, but on occasion to wander aimlessly is a necessary corrective to the burden of purpose.
A great book, On the Road. “Who moans for man?”
bb
What I took away from “On the Road” was not its purposelessness, but its yearning and hunger.
Just another hymn to looking for peace and satisfaction in this world where it cannot be found, though one drives from one end of it to the other and back again.
Kerouac was a Roman Catholic. Part of what captivates us in _On the Road_ is religious yearning along with cadences that recall liturgy. Though many readers may not quite realize these elements, they keep coming through. It is a memorable book. Some will counter that Kerouac was a “lapsed” Catholic during part of his life, but he had the upbringing and key beliefs that never left him; I believe I am right also that he had the last rites.