Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1515 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-24
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 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

Synopsis
"On the Road" swings to the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns and drugs, with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveller and mystic, the living epitome of Beat. Now recognized as a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Walt Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald, and it goes racing towards the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy and autobiographical passion.

Customer Reviews

On the Road-an alternative review
I started reading this book after hearing for so many years what a great classic it was!
I got to page 60, mostly by determination rather than interest.
This book is absolute rubbish-it's an unrelenting and monotonously boring monologue of some guy who thinks that we would be interested in what he bought from the local shop, the conversation he had with the petrol station attendant, where and how he slept for the night, etc, etc, ad nauseam.
Bob Dylan says on the back and I quote:-"... this book will change your life". Other people eulogise over how it changed..."the face of a nation"
Well, if this is the book that helped shape America in the 50's, it's very easy to see why we have a lot to fear from Americans!
These people don't have the first idea what great literature is.
On the Road is a joke, a pretence toward great literature, and as such an insult to the intelligence of anyone who picks up this and thinks he/she is going to get a great read.
My copy is going in the waste bin where it belongs.

Overrated
I fail to understand why this book has got such wonderful reviews and why people rave about it- it is completly tedious to read- Keroac wrote it in 4 weeks and it shows!

An emptiness at the core
On The Road wants so much to be a joyous affirmation, but it can't shake off the dread implicit in the title: that the journey is everything, that there is no meaningful destination. Add to that the fact that Moriarty is plainly mentally ill - borderline psychotic, perhaps - and it's hard for me to see how anyone can read this novel without a growing sense of profound sadness. There's something too of Prince Hal's rejection of Falstaff at the book's climax, a reference that Kerouac was too well-read not to have intended. The restlessness that drove these men to the road was not the largely benign curiousity of the hippies, rather it was an angry response to the post-war American consensus in which individuality was sacrificed to the common purpose of making the country great.

For all the talk of "kicks" (and it is mostly just talk), the business of crossing the American continent seems overwhelmingly exhausting, and as much as Kerouac rhapsodises he doesn't spare us the jags and come-downs, the grime and the sleeplessness, the smashed relationships and lost friendships. Moriarty is a bull in a china shop, wreaking havoc and justifying it with a solipsism too crass and crude to be called a philosophy. Sal Paradise shadows him with an almost creepy hero-worship, only to reject his mentor with a crushing inevitability. The cast of secondary characters gives the book its chorus, as they look on in varying degrees of complicity and/or disapproval, all of them knowing - and some of them saying - that the quest for this particular grail will surely end badly.

So a powerful and compelling novel, but not quite the book many people think. It's not difficult to imagine the impact it must have had on publication, embracing as it did the idea of a freedom hugely threatening to mainstream society. It's to Kerouac's great credit as a writer that his novel balances so many contradictions, that it acknowledges the dark shadow that stalks alongside its blissed-out protagonists.