On the Road (1957)
Author: Jack Kerouac

The book that launched a thousand trips. For his hyperkinetic, endearing, culture-changing novel, Kerouac admitted whole worlds through his windshield. An account of a few pinwheeling characters in perpetual cross-country motion, it has room to spare for rivers, landscapes, starry skies, Benzedrine addicts, endless marathons of driving, the hipster demiurge Dean Moriarty and lots of other fast-talking madmen. "Because the only people for me are the mad ones," Kerouac's narrator, Sal Paradise, tells us. "The ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved." Capote's famous putdown of the book got it exactly backwards. That's not typing, Truman. That's writing.—R.L.

From the TIME Archive:
"Kerouac has a Wolfelike love of the U.S. and a Whitmanesque weakness for cataloguing nearly every experience"
—TIME Magazine, Sept. 16, 1957

The Ganser Syndrome

Last summer a U.S. writer named Jack Kerouac went to Paris, was unable to find a room or anyone to talk to. and went home after a week. "Paris." he says, "rejected me." Now he spends a lot of time in his mother's house in Orlando, Fla., painting (on cheap paper, with a mixture of house paint and glue) and writing (sometimes in much the same style). Having learned that the Left Bank ''lost generation" era is no more, he writes about the "beat generation"—and "beat," he says, really stands for "beatific."

The post-World War II generation—beat or beatific—has not found symbolic spokesmen with anywhere near the talents of Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Nathanael West. In this novel, talented Author Kerouac, 35, does not join that literary league, either, but at least he suggests that his generation is not silent. With his barbaric yawp of a book. Kerouac commands attention as a kind of literary James Dean.

The story is set in the late 1940s. told in the first person by Sal Paradise, a budding writer given to ecstasies about America, hot jazz, the meaning of life, and marijuana. The book's protagonist is Dean Moriarty ("a sideburned hero of the snowy West"), who has spent a third of his waking time in poolrooms, a third in jail, a third in public libraries, and is always shouting "Yes, yes, yes!" to every experience. Dean and Sal and their other buddies—Carlo Marx, the frenzied poet; Ed Dunkel, an amiable cipher; Remi Boncoeur, who has the second loudest laugh in San Francisco—are forever racing cross-country to meet one another. Their frantic reunions are curiously reminiscent of lodge and business conventions, with the same shouts of fellowship, hard drinking, furtive attempts at sexual dalliance—and, after a few days, the same boredom.

Belly-Bottom Strain. Then Sal's pals are off again, by bus. on foot, by thumb, roaming the continent, feeling the wind of Wyoming nights and the heat of Texas days, looking for Moriarty's never-to-be-found father or anyone's sister, always expecting the ultimate in music or love or understanding around the next bend in the road. Excitement and movement mean everything. Steady jobs and homes in the suburbs are for the "squares."

Dean Moriarty. a real gone kid in whom Sal sees traces of a "W. C. Fields saintliness," is the only authentic proletarian in a basically timorous band of bourgeois rebels. Dean steals cars where the others are scarcely capable of filching a loaf of bread from an untended grocery. He takes women and abandons them, wrecks Cadillacs for the hell of it. deserts his friends. He talks a blue streak in a syntax-free jumble of metaphysics, hipster jargon, quotations from comic strips and animal gruntings. Describing the skills of a hot saxophonist. Dean cries: "Here's a guy and everybody's there, right? Up to him to put down what's on everybody's mind. He starts the first chorus, then lines up his ideas, people, yeah, yeah, but get it. and then he rises to his fate and has to blow equal to it. All of a sudden, somewhere in the middle of the chorus he gets it . . . Time stops. He's filling empty space with the substance of our lives, confessions of his belly bottom strain, remembrance of ideas, rehashes of old blowing."

Fevered Roman Candles Novelist Kerouac writes somewhat better than his hero speaks. Currently a member of the

San Francisco poets' group (whose disciples do not necessarily stay put in San Francisco), Kerouac has a Wolfelike love of the U.S. and a Whitmanesque weakness for cataloguing nearly every experience. His novel is partly an ingenuous travel book, partly a collection of journalistic jottings about adventures that are known to everyone who has ever hitchhiked more than a hundred miles in the U.S. The book's importance lies in Author Kerouac's attempt to create a rationale for the fevered young who twitch around the nation's jukeboxes and brawl pointlessly in the midnight streets. He sees his characters as "the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles." They are hedonists of the kind whose highest goal is "a fast car, a coast to reach, and a woman at the end of the road."

In literature, swaggering Dean Moriarty is perhaps closest in his amorality to a character created by Petronius Arbiter in the ist century A.D.—the rascally Encolpius, who lived by his wits in Nero's fat and frightened time. In contemporary terms, Moriarty seems even closer to a prison psychosis that is a variety of the Ganser Syndrome.* Its symptoms, as described by one psychiatrist, sound like a playback from Kerouac's novel: "The patient exaggerates his mood and his feelings: he 'lets himself go' and gets himself into a highly emotional state. He is uncooperative, refuses to answer questions or obey orders . . . At other times he will thrash about wildly. His talk may be disjointed and difficult to follow.''

The significant thing about sufferers from the Ganser Syndrome is that they are not really mad—they only seem to be.

^{* For Sigbert Joseph Maria Ganser, a Dresden psychiatrist (1853-1931).}

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,840332-3,00.html