On the Road

On the Road
by Jack Kerouac
read: circa 2006
Time 100 Novels, Modern Library #55, Guardian 1000 Novels

On the Road is the latest novel Professor Hungerford discusses in her class on the American Novel since 1945.  Her lectures on the book are interesting; she discusses, among other thing, the novel as a (platonic?) love story novel between Jack Kerouac / Sal Paradise and Neal Cassady / Dean Moriarty, the role of consumption capitalism in Kerouac's American Dream (as represented by the stunning quantity of pie Paradise eats), and the beat language.  But the thing that's always fascinated me about On the Road is whether it is really fiction at all; Kerouac's first draft used his name and those of his beatnik partners-in-crime (Cassady, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, etc.), suggesting it is really more autobiography.  Professor Hungerford expresses some cynicism about the literal truth of the story, almost in passing, and I wish she'd gone into that in a little more detail.

If we assume that the bulk of On the Road is, after some basic find-and-replace functions, literally true, there are interesting questions to ponder.  What does it tell us about Kerouac's life?  Is he living the way he's living because he needs to do so in order to write the way he wants to write?  Is he writing the way he is because he's mixed up in this crazy life and feels the need to document it?  Or are both the way he's living and his need for writing caused by some third drive, and inescapably intertwined?  Did Kerouac know what a vivid character Cassady would make?  Is that part of what drew him to Cassady in the first place?  How blurred is the line between On the Road as an autobiography and On the Road as a novel?