A review by stumpnugget
On the Road by Jack Kerouac

3.0

I just finished On The Road about an hour ago. I read it for the course I'm taking online about the American Novel, post war. I don’t know how I feel about it. I started to get really bored toward the end. There’s just so much of “we went there and met these people and then we went another place and met those people”. Sometimes it felt like a big travel log. Then I watched Amy Hungerford’s lecture on the second half of the book and, weirdly, she was also sort of skeptical about it. She didn’t portray it as great. So why did she have us read it for this class?

She observed some really interesting things about the book. It’s about immediate language that imitates life and jazz. There is supposed to be no barrier between the words on the page and the lived experience. Ok. That’s interesting. And there’s a weird erotic connection between Sal and Dean. And apparently God Is Pooh Bear. I don’t know what that means. I mean I guess Pooh Bear lives in the moment, and that’s sort of what On The Road is all about: Living now and experiencing now, right now. I’m not sure if that’s what that line means and, worse, I don’t know if I care. The book felt so much like something that was spit at me as opposed to having been crafted for me. Most books feel carefully crafted. This book seemed to be vomited.

I don’t know. It was sort of good, I guess. Like I got a cool hippy vibe from it and I can see why it was so inspiring to Dylan and other hippies. But in the end it just didn’t feel all that insightful or meaningful.