Why Jack Kerouac Is A Really Terrible Human Being

With Extra Bonus Topics: Picaresque Novels and Unreliable Narrators
 

 

On The Road 
Jack Kerouac

1957

An Alexandrine Couplet About Most Of The Characters In On The Road 

These shiftless assholes do not like society,

                                            they don’t like each other—and nobody likes them.

Yes, I’m poking a dragon here. Everyone loves this book. It’s a classic American novel. It embodies the American spirit. It’s the beatnik Bible. I’ve heard it all before. And I don’t deny that On The Road is one of the quintessential American novels (one of the top 3, at that). Maybe it would have captured something in me if I’d read it at 15. I may have wanted to run away from home, get on a train, and go go go go go. But I’ll tell you something no one else has: On The Road is a classic. But it’s also a terrible book.

So to break it down a bit, it’s fun to read. As Picaresque novels go, it’s entertaining and has great descriptions. The point of a Picaresque novel is that it doesn’t have a plot or a central action moving the story along. These books are actually just about people hanging out. The protagonists aren’t coming of age, solving a riddle, following a treasure map, chasing a love interest, or killing a vampire. They’re just bumming around. Some famous examples include Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote, so it’s not as absurd as it sounds.

As far as this one in particular, the protagonist and narrator, Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac in real life, because this book is autobiographical), races back and forth across the country with friends, spends time in San Francisco, goes as far away as Mexico City, and doesn’t do much. 

This is the Road Sal’s on

Sal hangs out with people, dances to jazz, smokes weed, hangs out with friends, and idealizes Dean Moriarty (read: Neal Cassidy). It’s all very exciting. And by exciting, I mean self-aggrandizing. Sal’s telling us it’s exciting, but if you were there watching, it would look pretty pathetic.

It’s important to understand that Sal is an unreliable narrator. He’s telling the story, but it’s all from his point of view and he’s not a trustable guy. With an unreliable narrator, you have to question if what they’re saying is actually true, or if they believe it’s true, but it may not be. So when Sal’s talking about how awesome his adventures are, are they actually awesome, does he just think they’re awesome, or does he just want you to think they’re awesome?  

 ISSUE 1: THEY'RE NOT LIKEABLE

The thing is, and let me make this clear: I don’t like this book because Sal and Everyone he knows are A-holes. They’re all obnoxious on their good days, and reprehensible on their bad ones. This isn’t my opinion, it’s there’s, because even in the book they all don’t like each other. In one scene a guy really wants to impress his parents. He invites all his friends out to dinner with them and expects they’ll be on their best behavior. But Sal and Everyone get wasted, make a scene, and walk out on the bill. How long would you hang out with these guys in real life? It’s all the more pitiful because it’s all a true story.

And that’s really one of my main problems with On The Road: these people seem fun and exciting and valid because Sal is writing from his own point of view. In real life, if you met Sal, you’d hate him. He’d judge you or steal from you. If Sal were your family member you would have stopped loaning him money years ago. He thinks he’s important and cool, but he’s a dick.

ISSUE 2: RACE

When Sal is rocking out and dancing to Jazz in San Francisco, he talks about all the African Americans hanging out in the bar. And he talks as though he understands them and they like him. It’s clear he’s one of very few honkies in a 50s African American jazz club and that he thinks he’s fitting right in. But if you’re paying attention you definitely get the impression that everyone in the room is wondering what the cracker is doing. In the 50s this may have all been very PC, but now it’s the equivalent of Quentin Tarantino using the word “nigger” in press conferences. He’s not edgy, he’s not “cool enough to do that”, and no one who’s paying attention really understand why he thinks he is. It’s inappropriate on multiple levels and he needs to shut his damned mouth. Kerouac writes like that in On The Road. It wouldn’t be a problem that he likes jazz and goes to these clubs if he didn’t go on and on about his togetherness with the people there, if he didn’t act like he was one of them, if he just played it cool. Instead, he really thinks he has a kinship with these people who can’t use the same drinking fountain as him in most of the country. He can go to their club and dance and pretend there's no difference, but they can’t go to his lunch counter and eat a sandwich, and they know it. He doesn’t get that they don’t feel any kinship with him at all, and that he’s a deadbeat white guy entitled enough to think he can say “nigger”. It’s sad that this is still such a thing:

Just because Jack Kerouac tells you he’s awesome and he writes good dialogue doesn’t mean you’d hang out with him in real life. 

We still have writers like this today.

ISSUE 3: MISOGYNY

These guys seem pretty PC toward racial minorities, but they all hate women. The soon-to-be released movie version made a big deal about Kristen Stewart playing Marylou. She’s in the posters and previews, and made the Late Shows circuit. And this bothers me because – and I can’t say this loudly enough – she’s not an important character! She in virtually every promo for the movie, but only because Hollywood realizes it will sell better that way. In the book, she was mostly in the background. She shows up and rides around with the male leads, and she’s relevant in a handful of scenes, but they don’t take her seriously or care about her. There’s not a one of them who isn’t a misogynist. Yes, it was the 50s and all, but these guys really don’t like girls. They all cheat on their girlfriends, never talk to them or listen to what they have to say, and one of them is actually married to several girls at once. In one scene a guy gets married, then ditches his wife and leaves town on his wedding night to go hang out with Sal and Everyone. Dude.

What all the relationships in On The Road looked like

So here’s the whole book, boiled down into one scene:  Sal hooks up with Terry, a Latina (By the way: Kerouac had a thing for Latinas – it comes up enough in his writing that we could call it a motif) and goes with her to her home outside of Bakersfield, California where her family lives in a work camp. He spends two days picking cotton with them. At first he sees it as beautiful, idyllic work in the bucolic countryside, a sort of tending-the-Garden-of-Eden job. His only irritation is that Terry’s brother keeps putting things off until tomorrow, saying over and over “Manana, we’ll do that manana.” Sal is terrible at picking cotton, and by the second day is complaining bitterly, focusing on how little he picks compared to the others and how labor intensive it is. He gives up and takes a bus back to New York. Sal leaves having never realized that he’s a condescending lily-white A-hole in an impoverished Mexican work camp in a cotton field. He didn’t notice that Terry and Family weren’t happy to be doing what they were doing, or that her brother put things off because he’s two exhausted from a day of field labor to do anything at all. He doesn’t realize these people barely get paid, that they’re not thrilled about living in squalor the way he and his friends are, that the work that was impossible for him is also very difficult for them, they’re just used to it and don’t have any choice or power. Kerouac said, in the same breath, “Oh, this is all so beautiful, man!” and “Wow, I’m not cut out for this kind of work!” When he left, he left behind Terry, and also any actual consciousness of her life and the lives of everyone she knows. Sal Paradise the character didn’t do that – it’s not ironic or thoughtful or pointing out the situation of migrant laborers. Jack Kerouac the author honestly just didn’t spend any time noticing it. He rides away on a bus still thinking these people live beautiful lives. 

Jack wrote about how envious he was of the beautiful, fulfilling lives of migrant Mexican laborers in California in the 40s. He wrote all about it on the bus on the way out of town, after two days of their work broke him.

And that’s the whole story of On The Road. Sal comes and goes, thinks everything is either terrible or great with little understanding of anything, sees nothing of lasting value in those he’s with, and finds no redemption. He’s selfish and self-centered, isolated, egotistical. He insists that he’s better than everyone. Because he’s narrating and says it like it’s true, people agree with him.  

I see why, at 15, with a barely there version of social consciousness, I may have read about this guy crisscrossing the county having a great time and thought, “That Sounds Awesome!” But really, they aren’t having a great time at all. If I met Jack Kerouac and his friends in real life, and they invited me to go away with them, I’d have to say something like, “Um . . . I have to be at work on Monday. And I have an apartment and a wife and all. Oh, and you’re all mean to each other and everyone you meet. So no, but you try to have fun wherever you end up.”

Again, I’m not saying you shouldn’t like the book. The book is a classic of American Lit and does work to describe a section of society in the 40s and 50s that we view as important. And it’s fun to read. It’s a good read. It’s has some great scenes, it’s hard to get bored with it, and it’s one of the better picaresque books out there. If you haven’t read it, you should give it a try. If you love it, I won’t try to talk you out of loving it. But don’t pretend there’s any good in any of these characters, or that their actions are anything short of shameless selfish indulgence. And please don’t get blind to who the writer is or what he’s like just because he’s blind to it himself.