On the Road A Search for Enlightenment

By Jake Wires, Student

Jack Kerouac's revolutionary voyage across the American continent

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

On the Road: A Search for Enlightenment

In the emotionally stagnant atmosphere of post-World War Two suburbia, while “square America” was striving to attain the blissfully mundane lifestyle portrayed by popular television sitcoms, a small group of people, led by Jack Kerouac and Allen Gisnberg, were desperately attempting to expand their horizons and find significance in their existences. Kerouac’s On the Road is perhaps the most famous account of the Beat Generation’s struggle to find emotional satisfaction and independence from the intensely conservative ideology of popular America. The novel, a blatant depiction of the excessive and controversial adventures of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady during their voyage across the American continent, was revolutionary both in its content and style. An obvious rebellion against the drone-like existence of the giant American middle class, On the Road illustrates Kerouac’s fear of monotony while subtly explaining the author’s search for spiritual enlightenment and the ecstasy of true knowledge. But even after all his frantic journeys to escape mediocrity, Kerouac is not satisfied, and he makes extensive use of contradictions and freeform prose to portray his noble yet unsuccessful attempt to find enlightenment.
Kerouac pledges his allegiance to the Beat society early on in the book, signifying his isolation from the average American.
The only people for me are 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 yawn or 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 centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” (5)
In this one rambling sentence, Sal Paradise describes the very essence of Beatitude, the fantastic desire and energy of those who fight to experience life to the fullest, and their common disdain for those who yawn, content to accept a mundane and manufactured life.
Kerouac’s use of long flowing sentences represents his contempt for square America, the insincere lifestyle of suburbia, and the pressure to conform to the popular style of the time. Kerouac intentionally uses a style opposite to the two most popular American authors of the time, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; the use of fluidly extended sentences is unlike Hemingway’s famously terse style, and the raw unedited spontaneous prose of On the Road is nearly opposite Fitzgerald’s extremely polished narration of The Great Gatsby. Kerouac’s style alone, his desire “to get it all down and without modified restraints and all hung-up on like literary inhibitions and grammatical fears…” is a strong statement against “tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical” methods of literary intellectuals “too dainty in their aestheticism;” in short, his style is intentionally unconventional in the oppressively traditional era of “square America” (4, 8, Dharma Bums, 14).
Paradise’s madness “to be saved” from mediocrity is the driving force behind his need to travel constantly, to leave “confusion and nonsense behind” while performing his “one and noble function of the time, move” (134). In order to escape the invisible confinement of commercialized America, the aptly named Paradise is always moving, searching for an unrestricted land of realization, a “blue centerlight pop” in the sky that elicits Awww’s of comprehension from everyone mad enough to look upwards.
For much of the novel, Paradise finds solace in “the purity of the road,” the “white line in the middle of the highway [that] unrolled and hugged our left front tire as if glued to our groove” (135). Paradise perceives something eerily uniform about the vast expanse of asphalt that crosses our country a thousand times over, an industrial network connecting and coalescing the nation, an arterial circulatory system responsible for transporting the lifeblood of America. The Road has some sort of power, some internal ability to propel its inhabitants forever forward – “sometimes he had no hands on the wheel and yet the car went straight as an arrow, not for once deviating from the white line in the middle of the road that unwound, kissing our left front tire” (116). Paradise’s repeated descriptions of the “white line in the holy road” illustrate his belief that “the road must eventually lead to the whole world,” a faith in a supernatural spirit guiding him safely towards his destination of understanding (139, 231).
And so Paradise takes to the Road, maintaining faith that everything will be ok: “Ah, but we know time. Everything takes care of itself. I could close my eyes and this old car would take care of itself” (158). His faith in the inevitabilities of life and death instill in him the confidence to deny convention, to ignore trivial matters and focus on more profound issues.
We know what IT is and we know TIME and we know that everything is really FINE…. They have worries, they’re counting the miles, they’re thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they’ll get there – and all the time they’ll get there anyway, you see. (209)
He left behind the mundane problems of suburban life, such as counting every mile traveled and worrying about the weather, to chase the glory of movement, to experience the “girls, visions, everything,” and to prepare himself for sublime reception: “somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me” (8). His journey was one of comprehension; he was prepared to accept a dense orb of knowledge capable of communicating a complete understanding of the supreme life force – God. Kerouac’s idea of God, the central energy of life, is not “a bearded man in Heaven;” rather it is a complete spiritual interconnectedness, an almost reincarnate sameness between every living creature – “THAT WHICH PASSES THROUGH ALL” (Johnson, 142).
While paradise specifically refutes the stereotypical “bearded man in Heaven” representation of God, he curiously personifies the knowledge he is chasing with a vision of a white-haired old man – “somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent” (55). Paradise feels a connection to this character, and for a while he even imagines that he himself is a form of the old man – “I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was “Wow!” (35). At the end of the novel, he encounters this man once again, and this time “the Word” was spoken:
I heard the sounds of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, “Go moan for man,” and clomped on back to his dark. (303)
This encounter was brief and cryptic, with the knowledge vanishing as quickly as it appeared, as if to display the fragile and reclusive of nature of the enlightenment Paradise is forever chasing.
This mystical old man is an archetypal representation of wisdom, traveling unaccompanied across the land to spread the Word of knowledge. The fact that Paradise pictures himself as this man illustrates his belief that every person is capable of sharing wisdom – any person with a fresh perspective on life, like Paradise when he travels West for the first time, can educate and illuminate others who might be stuck in the rut of conventionality. Paradise’s association with eccentric beat members, his extensive use of mind-altering drugs, and his journeys across the country are his methods of searching for this unique knowledge; he is aware that at any time, near incomprehensible utterances of the Word could offer life-altering enlightenment, as long as one is willing to receive inspiration from any form of angel.
The prophetic old man is significantly similar to Dean Moriarty’s father, but contradictory to the prophet, Moriarty’s father was a “wino,” the worst kind of drunkard, with “spittle on his chin, water on his pants, molasses in his ears, scabs on his nose, maybe blood in his hair” (233). Still, Sal and Dean were on a mission to find him, to reconnect to Dean’s history and glean a bizarre knowledge from this important nomadic figure. “I knew I had to find my father wherever he is and save him” (184). By attaching the image of a sloppy drunkard with blood in his hair to the conventional perception of the wise bearded man with flowing white hair, Kerouac uses contradiction to illustrate his faith in the complete interconnectedness of all life; the outcasts of society are every bit as important and wise as the institutionalized icons of mainstream America.
There are brief moments in the novel where Paradise does connect with the knowledge he is questing for:
And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels…. (173)
Paradise’s elation at comprehending TIME illustrates his feeling of spiritual immortality; he no longer had to worry about meeting the timetables of conventional society, such as finding a career and wife before the age of 25. His awareness that death is kicking at his heels shows that he is aware of social timetables, but his lack of fear of the “spirit pursuing all of us across the desert of life [that is] bound to catch us before we reach heaven,” illustrates his indifference to common fears of old age and death (124).
At the end of his journeys, Paradise finds a “magic land at the end of the road,” a place of which he “never dreamed the extent of the magic,” a “strange Arabian paradise we had finally found at the end of the hard, hard road…” (276, 289). The fact that he thinks he has found enlightenment at a brothel is another sign of unconventionality – instead of finding inspiration at a extravagant church or a startling foreign city, he feels he has achieved comprehension at a Mexican brothel while falling in love with a strange prostitute.
These elevated occurrences present Paradise with visions of “the Word” that promise illumination – they are the very essence of the enlightenment Paradise seeks.
But while such epiphanies were Paradise’s entire motivation for traveling, they occurred rarely and did not last long. “Red shadows were beginning to creep, and somewhere I heard a baby wail in a sudden lull, remembering I was in Mexico after all and not in a pornographic hasheesh daydream in heaven” (289). Even the holy road, the liberating and connective skeleton of America, had become “hard,” almost unbearable to Paradise. And the incomprehensible magic at the end of the American road was in fact only a “pornographic hasheesh daydream,” not the ecstatic realization of spirituality.
In one last fatal blow to the naiveté of traveling incessantly in search of enlightenment, Kerouac ends the novel on a decidedly melancholy note. Initially, Paradise is ecstatic to tell the tales of a frenetic underground society of Beats, extreme characters with boundless energy –
His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life. (127)
But by the end of his travels, Paradise begins to question his methods and debate the true worth of his extensive journeys.
I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginingless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance. (253)
This is the ultimate contradiction. Paradise’s Epic search for divine knowledge was nothing more than a procession through “endless and beginingless emptiness” – the Road does not lead to the whole world, it does not lead to enlightenment, it does not lead to anything; it just continues to roll on, a “senseless nightmare” of eternity. Even though Paradise’s deliberate rebellion made a successful political and ideological statement, it amounts to nothing more than “raggedy madness”, an uncontrolled riot of insurgence. The knowledge he ultimately gained was nothing more than a “pitiful form of ignorance”.
Through his continued use of contradictions, his revolutionary style, and his refusal to submit to the status quo, Kerouac makes a rebellious social statement against the almost oppressively conservative atmosphere of square America. The fact that the attitude of Paradise shifts from naïve optimism to melancholy wisdom shows that Paradise did learn from his journeys, even if he did not fully find the enlightenment he was searching for. Paradise finds significance in the immensity of the road, and perhaps by the end of the novel, he concedes that his impermanence would make it impossible for him to truly conquer the “endless and beginingless “ road. But rather than feeling defeated at the end of his journeys, he feels wiser, and he portrays his true respect for the mad Beats, like Dean Moriarty, who refuse to stop moving, always searching for the divine knowledge that will bring supreme significance to their very existences.
So in America when the sun goes down… and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it… and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty. (307)


Works Cited

Johnson, Joyce. Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1983.
Kerouac, Jack. The Dharma Bums. New York: Viking Press, 1958.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1955.