On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Road is one of the best Beat novels written by Jack Kerouac. It is a captivating, moral and touching tale that has given a detailed account of a friendship and the four trips across America. The writer has used his full creativity and talents in producing this piece of work. The presentation is so effective that the readers starts to have a feeling that if he/she is in that place.

The narrator of this tale is a character named as Sal Paradise who is a young college boy living with his aunt in Paterson, New Jersey. The real story starts from the point when a college friend of Sal invites him to spend some time with him in San Francisco besides he also wanted to see his most beloved friend Dean Moriarty in Denver.

Dean Moriarty is the second most prominent character of the story who is presented as a talkative, womanizer type of a guy, who was living in New York in a hope to become a writer. He is very much idealized by Sal as he is too joyous and is very confident and smart while being with women. In the last part of the novel, the statement "go moan for man" stated on page 303 is the sum up or the conclusion of the whole story.

It reflects that Sal had at last successfully found the secret for which he was searching. From the very beginning of the story Sal and his friends are presented as a crazy youth who is enormously energized with the ambition to fully enjoy the life and hence they kept moving around all the corners of America in search of the real meaning of life. In this way they used to test the limits of the American Dream.

They experienced every kind of excitement of life that they were able to go through and traveled through every kind of region present in the United States including the scenes of rural wasteland, small towns, jungles, and endless deserts. All these acts reflects that they were in search of a means to fulfill their desires and inner need to get out, break all sort of imprisonments and find the true freedom, enlightened from any higher belief, conception, or principles.

Being in a young age their urge to find something and the lack of fulfillment of their desires made them feel that the only way to fulfill their desires and the only means to gain freedom from all the confinements was to keep rushing here and there in search of it, to keep looking for ways to gain their personal freedom. There lack of maturity and knowledge thus led them to look for the fulfillment of their desires in sex, drugs, and jazz.

From the pattern of life the "beat generation," as presented by Jack, it seems that they were the believers of only a single principle or philosophy and that philosophy was life. For them the only purpose of life was to enjoy it to it's highest potential and to spend it free from the restrictions imposed by the society.

This believes was quoted by Sal himself at a point: "Life is holy and every moment is precious" This is an enough explanation as to why they were most often found to be involved in trying out everything at a single time. The white shredded person, as far as my opinion is concerned, was the creation of Sal's subconscious as he had an internal fear of and the rest of his gang was experiencing the same feeling. This feeling followed the group throughout America.

This was openly expressed by almost all of them that they feel that a spirit is following them across the desert of life, which was in actual the fear of death.

Their feelings are expressed on several occasions as one of them mentioned below, "...the mad ones, 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 say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue center light pop and everybody goes 'Awww! '" This can be further proved from the following statement of Sal that the white shrouded stranger was no one but the fear of death that formed the shape of a strange character, "We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess-across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent." This internal fear was the main factor that motivated them to fully enjoy the excitements of life because they never knew that when will death come to them and will make them "silent" forever.

The directive that this imaginary character gave them was that they should search for their true self and to find the real meaning of life.

It urged them to search for their true self as they felt that they are moving away from life towards death with the span of time, as is reflected in the following statement, "What is that feeling when you're driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -- It's the too huge world vaulting us, and it's goodbye.

But we lean toward to the next crazy adventure beneath the skies." This novel is for the beat generations as it presents the "beat generation" as a "holy" generation. The reason for presenting them like this is that this generation was free from the hazard of aspiration, greediness and beliefs, and was in a constant search for some greater truth that life would teach them. On the Road is a story of experiences and search; it reveals the secret of life. It is a tale.