"On the Road" by Jack Kerouac

I first read this book when I was fourteen years’ old and I’m not going to lie to you, the very first time I read it - I didn’t actually enjoy it all that much. The reason was because it was written in a style that I was entirely used to and so, I didn’t end up understanding the entire drift of the novel. Instead, I put it aside for a while, hoping that someday I would figure it all out. And that’s exactly what happened. When I was sixteen years’ old, I saw the novel “On the Road” in a bookshop in my hometown and I was immediately taken back to those memories of trying to get into it at fourteen and failing miserably. The reason these memories were so pressed into my mind was because of the fact that it was just after my fourteenth birthday and I had a science test the day after completing the book. The copy in the shop window was absolutely beautiful and I went to buy it. Instead of just having the book, it had some explanatory essays I made use of as well and so, when I ended up re-reading it (well, I’ll call it reading for the first time, because it was the first time I understood it), I read the essays as well and referred to all this extra material for guidance. It slowly became one of my favourite books to re-read after that.

Soon afterwards, when I was about to turn twenty-two, I bought myself a copy of the book “The Best Minds of My Generation” by Allen Ginsberg where he actually talks about the way in which “On the Road” is written and how the rhythm and styles end up sounding almost like jazz in the book, both semantically and phonologically. I then re-read the book by Jack Kerouac, highlighted my Ginsberg book in the process with notes I’d made on the chapters about Kerouac and understood even more of what the book was about through this incredible reading. I came to understand that this book is more than a road trip taken by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty because of this strange almost Hemingway-styles dislocation they both feel and this odd almost Steinbeck-esque displacement from the progressing, changing and often industrialising world. It is also about culture. “On the Road” is a book about the cultural experience without all the noise in-between - culture without the commercial influence. It is about root jazz with the raw and rowdy beats of a theory of the beat generation and their writing styles of rhythm and pulse entitled (or rather, nicknamed) ‘salt-peanuts’ (I suggest you look it up, it is brilliant) as put forward by Allen Ginsberg in his book “The Best Minds of My Generation”. I’m not going to pretend like I understand everything about the book but after the age of fourteen when I was first challenged to comprehend this brilliant, rhythmic way of writing and reading, I initially went to work on trying to read other books that sounded and read differently to what I was first used to. When I returned to “On the Road” by Kerouac at sixteen I not only read this book but a number of other works by Kerouac as well including: “Visions of Cody”, “Visions of Gerard”, “Maggie Cassidy” and one of my personal favourites purely because of its incredible visual styles, brilliant writing and awesome power of language - “The Town and the City”.

I think to explain it best, I went into a deep research of Jack Kerouac and the way he wrote because it was not only different for me, but I noticed that I couldn’t really place him with the writers of his own time. He was entirely different to anyone from that era and what he did, nobody else could do and since he did it, nobody else has been able to do it like him - even though they have tried. You may believe that what Kerouac writes looks like a first draft but when you scratch beneath this bubbling surface you will find something so clever and so meticulously structured that it is bound to blow your mind.