Giving the Devil His Due - On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Whenever the question about overrated classics is posed on this sub or elsewhere, a frequent answer is On the Road by Jack Kerouac. I myself have propagated this sentiment. When I read Kerouac's opus, I found it incredibly tedious, boring and ultimately pointless... but maybe that's part of the point.
When I zoom out from the actual experience of reading the novel I see that On the Road is a story about being lost, rudderless, completely unmoored from any responsibility or duty. Dean is a creature of pure impulse who seems indifferent to the consequences of his actions. He is, in that way, a personification of youth. He moves from one thing to the next at breakneck speed, each time trying and failing to satiate whatever hunger he is feeling but can't diagnose. I think he's searching for meaning but keeps getting let down, because he's looking in the wrong places. Instead he just ends up feeding on the resources - whether spiritual, mental or financial - of other people until they are spent or can't be bothered with him anymore.
After ruminating on the novel for some time, I realized that Dean is actually a much more contemporary figure than I had initially thought. That chase, that unstoppable urge to hunt for purpose and satisfaction, reminds me a lot of my own generation, the Zoomers. Much has been said about Gen Z's "meaning crisis," and I don't want to litigate it as a phenomenon here, but when I think about Dean, I keep relating him to some bleary-eyed teen or 20-something laying in bed at 2 AM scrolling through their bottomless feed of attention traders, trying to find the right thing. It's a pointless quest, because they're is looking in the wrong place, but one often doesn't even realize that they're doing it in the first place. One is gambling with time, precious milliseconds, each time betting that the next thing to be algorithmically offered will be worth one's while.
As one moves through the literary canon, it becomes clear that crises of meaning or purpose are not unique to Gen Z, and I think that Kerouac's protrayal of it in On the Road is actually quite a compelling one. The complete lack of structure or narrative thrust serves its themes about the chaos of young adulthood. It leaves you staring at the final page thinking both "that's it?" and "thank God that's over." Based on what people in their 30's and above say, that is very much the dichotomy with which many people retrospect on their youth.
I think the disconnect with myself and other readers is that the book's narrator (which I understand to be a stain-in for Kerouac himself) seems to think that Dean's lifestyle is aspirational. He seems to admire Dean's carelessness, even when it makes life more difficult for everyone around him. If Dean was portrayed as more tragic, or if he ended up having to atone for his selfishness, I think it would make for a much more narratively satisfying end for him, but I think that the lack of narrative satisfaction illustrates a fact about life, which is life doesn't resolve the way we want it to. Life is messy, jagged, disproportional, asymmetrical, unjust.
When I think about the experience of reading On the Road, I think about how bored out of my mind I was, how miniscule details were lingered on for way too long, how dislikable all the characters were, how badly I yearned for the end and wanted for there to be some sort of reckoning. I went into it expecting greatness and all I found was mediocrity, and worse still, celebrated mediocrity. You learn nothing. There is no justice. The reading experience mirrors the anomie of the novel. "You read these 300 pages and thought you would get some life lesson or catharsis? Jokes on you. Everything is fucked, no one knows what they're doing and no one cares about anything. Welcome to life."
That is my take on what On the Road, a book I still dislike very much, does right. I like thinking about the book far more than I like reading it, but thinking about a book is also part of the reading experience. I would of course have prefered to enjoy my time reading as well, but that's not the experience I had, so I might as well get something worthwhile out of the hours I spent trudging through the text.
Cheers :)
Edit: spelling/grammar