A Load Off My Mind: Kerouac

Ha, that’s a relief! Per Andrew Carroll (Theodore Dalrymple), I do not need to respect Jack Kerouak as a great writer (H/T Kurp).

Throughout the book, which covers a period of years, Dean Moriarty does not do a single decent thing and does many bad ones. We are told that in one year he stole 500 cars, as if this were a mere matter of fun or romance; it does not seem to occur to Paradise that this means that his friend must have caused considerable suffering and anguish, solely to gratify himself very briefly. It is a tediously obvious point, but the fact is that most people are attached to their vehicles, if not emotionally, then for very practical reasons; they find it upsetting when they are stolen. Only someone fundamentally indifferent to the interests and feelings of others would not think this not very difficult thought.

When the pair of them engage to drive a Cadillac from the south to Chicago, to deliver it to its owner there, they wreck it. They feel no guilt about this, because the owner is a rich man who can probably afford ten Cadillacs. Of course, they don’t know this in advance; perhaps the car is his sole asset, but his wealth provides them with a post facto exculpation of their irresponsibility. For them, the question of honor, honesty, and due care for what belongs to another simply does not arise.

Moriarty treats women abominably and uses them solely as objects for his gratification; he is violent towards them; no single instance of consideration towards any of them is given in the book; he has several children by them, all of whom he abandons without a moment’s hesitation or subsequent thought for their fate, though he himself is the victim of an unfortunate upbringing. This, it should be noted, makes him not less, but more culpable, inasmuch as he is perfectly aware of the effect that such an upbringing can have upon a child.

... In fact, it is the extreme banality of On the Road, combined with a glamorous aura of anarchy (in the midst of a society in which there is always enough gasoline for the anarchists to resume their journey, of course), which has made it perennially attractive to youth—an age of man always tempted by bad taste—ever since its publication. If Dean’s utterances are profound and worthy of record, then anything that any of us says is likewise profound and worthy of record; if Dean is a philosopher, we are all philosophers. In this respect, the book is like a soap opera that reassures untold millions that the day-to-day flux of their existence is not without significance, or else why would something so closely resembling it be on television?

…[ N]either Sal nor Dean are very interested in anything at all apart from themselves, and even in themselves only in the shallowest, most inconsequential possible way. They travel across America four times, but they express only the most cursory interest in the people they meet, and often no interest in them at all if they cannot use them in some dishonest way or other; the history of the country does not arouse their curiosity or enthusiasm; neither do questions of politics or economics; nature, in the form of landscape, flora, and fauna, entirely escapes their notice. If On the Road is a Bildungsroman, it is one that is very short on the Bildung.

Update:Gilleland nails it (link).