Kerouac the Friendship at the

Kerouac The Friendship at the Center of on the Road When it was first published in 1957, Jack Kerouac's on the Road was received like a revelation. Not only was Kerouac's writing style and approach to prose radically different from any that had been seen in the past, but it has also cast a light on a counterculture that to this juncture had persisted as largely unknown by mainstream America.

Particularly through its intimate and humanizing portrayal of several key figures in the burgeoning counterculture movement, on the Road functions to bring the ideals, struggles and cultural implications of this lifestyle to greater and more sympathetic awareness. The warm friendship between Sal and Dean serves as the center of the text, promoting a particularly human subtext that readers from all socio-cultural backgrounds can identify with. This forms the basis of the book's somewhat universal power.

This power is a remarkable accomplishment given the inherently defiant nature of the text and the socio-cultural group that it represents. According to a review of the text by Hassani (2005), "Kerouac presents Sal Paradise, a young and innocent writer, and Dean Moriarty, a crazy youth "tremendously excited with life" racing around America, and testing the limits of the American Dream.

Their journeys consist of scenes of rural wilderness, sleepy small towns, urban jungles, endless deserts-all linked by the road, the outlet of a generation's desire and inner need to get out, break its confinement, and find freedom, liberated from any higher belief, notion, or ideology." (p. 1) This description places the two protagonists of the story in a state of seemingly endless drift and with little purpose beyond the pursuit of hedonist impulses.

This makes the relationship that the two characters establish with one another a point of great importance, both as a stabilizing force in a sometimes dizzyingly plot-less series of misadventures and as a bastion of comfort to one another as they endeavor through the many unfamiliar stitches to the American fabric. So is this demonstrated in Kerouac's own descriptions, which clearly channel the intense and inspiring friendship shared between the two men who truly lived as part of the beat movement.

This dimension of the relationship between the two men is remarked upon by Cunnell (2007) who confirms in a foreward for one printed addition of the Kerouac text that "On the Road does not appear out of the clear blue air. From Kerouac's writing journals we know that during his travels through America and Mexico from 1947 to 1950 he collected material for a road novel he first mentions by name in an entry dated August 23, 1948." (p.

3) it is thus that we come to understand on the Road as a log drawn from personal experience, and therefore imbued with all of the recklessness and realism of the friendship around which it centers. To place his figures in this state of constant mobility against the backdrop of a changing America is to constantly challenge the assumptions of the characters about their surroundings and to challenge the readers' assumptions regarding these challenges.

The article by Cresswell (1993) points the conversation in an interesting direction by theorizing that the theme of mobility that drives the novel is both crucially important to identity in the counterculture and to the mainstream values that are carried by the American pioneering spirit. In other words, it may be viewed that a focus on the this theme of mobility would be essentially to making Kerouac's work on a fringe culture so universally relatable.

According to Cresswell, there is an "apparent paradox of the ways in which mobility is used in Jack Kerouac's novel on the Road (1957). On the one hand the frantic directionless mobility of the central figures in on the Road represents a form of resistance to the 'establishment'. On the other hand mobility is clearly a central them in mainstream North American culture, at least important to the 'American Dream' as small town values and apple pie." (Cresswell, p.

249) In a manner, this also points us toward a more direct consideration of the friendship around which this novel revolves. In the relationship between Sal and Dean, we are given not just an autobiographical window into the lives of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassidy respectively, but also into the core values to which the counterculture movement was essentially committed.

Again, this denotes the inherently relatable nature of Kerouac's otherwise bold content, with the friendship between Sal and Dean serving as a reflection of the community and family values that round out the parallels with 'establishment' culture. These parallels make the text a particularly valuable meditation on America as it struggled between its cherished traditional values and the creeping threat of modernization. With respect to this struggle, it can be said that the characters of Sal and Dean battled endlessly with a sense of disillusionment and disenfranchisement.

As evidenced by the focus of the book itself on Jack's friendship with Neal, we can see that the two characters there-inspired are intended to function as artistic muses to one another. Accordingly, many of the conversations which pass between them carry the overtones of discontent and the sentiment of artistic initiative. At the base of both of these senses, we can see in Kerouac's own word choice that the two men feed off of one another' talents and emotions for support.

So shows one exchange, where Kerouac reports, "in the bar I told Dean, 'Hell, man, I know very well you didn't come to me only to want to become a writer, and after all what do I really know about it except you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.' And he said, 'Yes, of course, I know exactly what you mean and in fact all those problems have occurred to me, but the thing that I want is the realization of those factors that should one depend on Schopenhauer's dichotomy for any inwardly realized.

' and so on in that way, things I understood not a bit and he himself didn't.'" (Kerouac, p. 3) In addition to capturing the stream of consciousness style that was a key feature of Kerouac's work, this passage demonstrates the intellectual charge which each man gathered from the other. The story.