On_The_Road

On The Road Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. This book is essentially made up of four parts, that is, four journeys chronicled by a young writer, Sal Paradise. We also experience his feelings in both the lead-ups and follow-ups to his journeys. His first journey is when he heads west from his college life in the east. We find Sal discontented with his everyday life, he feels his college life has ‘reached the completion of its cycle’ and wants to take off, to break this circle in search of fresh experience. We see Sal’s trip partly through the eyes of Kerouac himself. The book is not totally autobiographical but it is regarded as written in ‘his [Kerouac’s] own self-image’. ‘I was a young writer and wanted to take off’ (OTR 14), we see Sal both yearning for fresh experience and also writing material. We cannot define exactly why he chooses to leave because he doesn’t seem to know that himself. It is, quite simply, the search for kicks through jeopardy and circumstance; sights, sounds and people with stories to tell (or people who are stories themselves). ‘Somewhere along the line I knew there’d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl road, sal, people, dean, life, security, real, young, world, notion, money, experience, characters, book, aunt, writer, traveling, through, themselves, stories, seem, provides, part, own, otr, others, college, both, america, across, writing, worry, west, unknown, unable