Product Description

Sal Paradise, a young innocent, joins the slightly crazed Dean Moriarty on a breathless, exuberant ride back and forth across the United States. Their hedonistic search for release or fulfilment through drink, sex, drugs and jazz becomes an exploration of personal freedom, a test of the limits of the American dream. A brilliant blend of fiction and autobiography, Jack Kerouac's exhilerating novel defined the new 'Beat' generation. It had tremendous impact on both sides of the Atlantic and made him famous overnight.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5810 in Books
• Published on: 1998-09-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
On The Road, the most famous of Jack Kerouac's works, is not only the soul of the Beat movement and literature, but one of the most important novels of the century. Like nearly all of Kerouac's writing, On The Road is thinly fictionalised autobiography, filled with a cast made of Kerouac's real life friends, lovers and fellow travellers. Narrated by Sal Paradise, one of Kerouac's alter-egos, this cross-country bohemian odyssey not only influenced writing in the years since its 1957 publication but penetrated into the deepest levels of American thought and culture. --Acton Lane

About the Author
Jack Kerouac was born in Massachusetts. He had written his first novel by age eleven and decided to become a writer at seventeen. He called his style 'spontaneous prose' and recorded the life of the American 'traveler' and the experience of the beatgeneration of the 1950s. He was working on his longest novel of all, a surrealistic study of the last ten years of his life, when he died in 1969, aged forty-seven.

Customer Reviews

On The Road in search of a deeper meaning
I have just finished an exhilirating ride through Kerouac's almost deranged writing style. There appears to be no filters between his mind and his words and I can picture him committing this work to paper in an almost trance-like frenzy.

While many things have and can be said about this book - that it describes a hedonistic search for release and meaning, lost souls in search for the metaphorical holy grail, self-obsessed idiots using and abusing people and circumstances - to me this book is primarily about life. But this isn't life as many of us know it, this is life on the very edge of sanity where mystical experience mingles with psychosis.

I believe this is why the book is such a love/hate piece of literature. If you haven't felt the desperation in life that looms so heavily over Dean Moriarty's and Sal Paradise's heads, there is no way you can sympathize with or understand them. If I as a reader haven't had the experience of extreme dissatisfcation, of a tremendous longing for something better and an image in my mind of there being a way of living that is more genuine, more rewarding, I wouldn't be able to connect with the deeper meaning of this novel.

So in essence, this book's primary theme is a spiritual one, the search for *what is*. The frenzied protagonists Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise travelling across the somewhat grim backdrop of a post-World War 2 American landscape keep searching for this meaning in the external world of people, situations, places and experiences. The book reveals how this search goes unfulfilled, but in a way, you feel that it is not, after all, a waste of time. In a very real way, these protagonists display a level of sanity above and beyond what most of us possess, as having touched the depths of the human condition, they are among the few that go searching for more. Unwilling to let social conditioning, conformity and a sense of fitting in hold them back, their search is completely uninhibited. (and as such, probably offensive)

I believe this testament to the power of the human spirit is what makes people love the book. Possibly, what makes people hate it is that it brings to light the painful realization of how most of us go through life without ever having truly lived - living a timid life in fear of the unknown, unwilling to take a chance on something better. A simpler explanation could be the convoluted language which is difficult to interpret at times.

Even though it is obvious that the literary creations of Kerouac's (and probably Kerouac himself) go about their goal of release in ways that are in large part misinformed - primarily looking outside instead of inside, the experience of tagging along is definitely worthwhile and can teach us a thing or two about our own search for happiness. Make no mistake - in our joyless contemporary society, this work is as relevant as ever.

In conclusion, I would like to offer a parallel between the character of Dean Moriarty and my favourite Albert Einstein quote:

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed"

If this is not something you agree with, you will likely hate this book. However, if this sounds strangely familiar, I suspect this book will teach you a thing or two about life.

This book should be re-named- "The Bible"
The discovery of 'On The Road' has (excuse the cliché) changed my life irreversibly. I found it to be the most riveting, energetic, powerful and inspirational work I have ever had the fortune to read. My poor friends, and just about anyone else who has cared to listen, have had to endure my crazed ramblings of passion and attempts to describe the sheer genius and delightful brilliance of Kerouac and his work. I cannot begin to describe how much this book has affected my entire perception of the World and everything within it. Kerouac feeds the itch within anyone who has a rambling soul, leaving the reader craving for their dreams, every character is crafted with such skill and subtle, tactical brilliance; you fall in love with each one. Sparkling, pulsing dialogue, evocative simple depiction, passion, craving, this book is so modest and subtle...Kerouac is a literary God. Please read this, buy it, buy a copy for everyone you know! It would be shameful to live without ever knowing, without ever realising.... This book should be handed out in schools and workplaces and universities and streets all over the world. Please, just read it!!

So, in response to other reviewers, who I can almost believe do not have one passionate or adventurous bone in their bodies: Can you not see the pure and simple LIFE of this story? I cannot believe anyone could dismiss this. I was devastated to reach the final page; it is so rare to find such a miracle. So please, show me a more faultless achievement of a novel, for I would love to read it. But I believe you'll have difficulties- this is as close to perfection as it gets.

And to those who have the soul and the insight into the heart of a real darling, angel of a man, to share in my delight, there is a poem by William Burroughs that may interest you:

Remembering Jack Kerouac

Writers are, in a way, very powerful indeed. They write the script for the reality film. Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. Now if writers could get together into a real tight union, we'd have the world right by the words. We could write our own universes, and they would all be as real as a coffee bar or a pair of Levis, or a prom in the Jazz Age. Writers could take over the reality studio. So they must not be allowed to find out that they can make it happen. Keroac understood this long before I did. Life is a dream, he said.

A lonely, sighing, windswept adventure.
At a great moment of insecurity and uncertainty in my own life, I found 'On The Road' a keening, comforting book which imbued a feeling that everything was going to be alright. It follows the trail of Sal Paradise, as he heads across the lonely continent, sometimes looking for and sometimes finding Dean Moriarty, who becomes his best friend. The feelings Sal experiences; the loneliness, hunger and longing, as well as the small triumphs, portents and temporary completeness, are what makes this book so real. I have felt like this, you have felt like this, and we all will again. As friends fade away, become more than friends, live, and die; life goes on somewhere else. This is a message brought across to me by Kerouac in the most profound way. 'On The Road'is a superb book, surprisingly apt for those of my own age, thrust into life to find there are often more questions than answers. It encourages us to delight in the simple 'not knowing' of our generation, and to revel in our youth.