Kerouac’s America: Jazz and Life on the Road Essay

cakehole Kerouacs On the bridle-path portrays the entire spectrum of American experience- from the migrator worker to the deranged artist to the Midwestern farmer. All of these at variance(p) figures he blends together into iodine tapestry, creating a picture of the United States that, withal if sometimes bleak, is always sympathetic. Kerouacs vision of America is best reflected through and through his observations on cognise and career on the passageway. Jazz has often been called the hardly truly American art form and its place in On the Road is appropriately significant.When Kerouac writes of be-bop jam sessions he describes these events as decidedly more than violent, more passionate, and more alive than the typical concert. In one instance, a saxophonists solo drives doyen Moriarty into a trance, clapping his hands, and effusive sweat on the mans keys (198). Sal and dean use jazz as a means of set issueing through the staid deference of 1950s America, feeding off its infectious energy. Having grown intolerant of dull, stock(a) experience Sal proclaims, the only state for me are the frenzied ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved (5).On the Road itself is the return of such(prenominal) a creative frenzy, full of wild run-on sentences and divorce syntax. The urgency apparent in Jazz is also at the get-go of Sal and Deans travels across the country. They roam from coast to coast ofttimes without any concrete motivation besides the joy of the ride and an essential restlessness. They seek to somehow transcend the physical world through drugs or sex or non-stop conversation, but never quite reach the IT, of which Dean speaks to Sal. Jazz does allow them to approach something near this quasi- phantasmal transcendence and thus, they enc pull back jazz musicians as saints, or even gods.In one instance, Dean adamantly refers to the blind pianist George Shearing as Old theology Shearing and to his empty piano seat as Gods empty chair (128). The Jazz clubs operate as secular churches for Sal and his companions, places where otherworldliness can be revitalized and restored. The Beat figures portrayed in On the Road do not seek to destroy social and religious traditions, as many would suggest, but rather to restore some of their soulfulness, their purity. Jazz, at its best, serves as medium to help usher in this new paradigm.Kerouac asserts that, in a way, Americas true religion is its music. Nowhere in On the Road is the American scene painted as intimately as on Sals first experience with feel on the road. That initial experience, as well as those that follow it, lends Sal a deeper acuteness into a set of truly American types. He meets with drifters, farm boys, and migrant workers hitching a ride on the back of a pickup truck. The whimsy of easy camaraderie between the fellow hitchhikers is nowhere to be show in contemporary America- the farm boys call sroom for everybody recalls a muc h diametrical time (22).Kerouacs America moves not only at the break neck ill-use of a Charlie Parker saxophone solo, but also slows to the pace of characters like multiple sclerosis Gene whose language is melodious and slow (23). Whereas life in the city is characterized by loud jazz played deeply into the night, life on the road is filled with slow, melodious voices like that of Mississippi Gene. Mississippi Gene also brings out the dark side of life on the road, telling Sal that hell folly a man galvanic pile an alley if he ever needs money (23), though or so of the characters Sal meets are described as grateful and gracious (28).By hitchhiking, Sal is suitable to form genuine bonds with folks just struggling to get by, and this find of egalitarian fellowship pervades his journey. The road not only allows Sal to meet people he might not ordinarily come in foregather with, but also to gain more knowledge of himself. When Dean cries out at the beginning of one journey that we should realize what it would mean to us to understandthat were not reallyworried just about anything, one senses that travelling, for Sal and Dean, is as much about letting go of yourself as it is about getting to your destination.Sal, however, never seems to achieve this letting go, weighed down by a cry of What gloom (52). But there are moments in which he approaches that ecstatic state Dean refers to as IT, as in a conversation on one cross-country trip with Dean, where Sal describes our final unhinged joy in talking and living (209). But of course, On the Road portrays experience much more varied than pure wide-eyed ecstasy. The aforesaid(prenominal) dark side of life on the road looms everywhere in the novel and extends further than just the possibility of being mugged or assaulted. at that place is also the problem of too much granting immunity- the possibility that one give roam so much that one will permanently lose ones center. Deans New York apartment contains th e homogeneous battered trunk stuck out from under the bed, ready to fly, suggesting that no liaison where he goes, his soul is always on the road (250). One begins to admire if Sal and Deans journeys are motivated as much by an attempt to escape themselves as to see the country. But though the trials of the road leads Sal at a one point to lament that hes sick and tired of life (106), he also figures the gain of traveling above its inevitable losses.Here, Kerouac subverts business terminology like loss and gain, and gives them a spiritual import, illuminating the central thrust of On the Road- Americans should start thought about spiritual profit rather than just economic dominance. Accruing such spiritual profit involves taking risks and being able to embrace the freedom to travel uncharted physical, mental, and spiritual territory. This underlying principle of freedom is at the root of both jazz and life on the road, whether one is exploring a landscape or the nuances of a mus ical phrase. In On the Road, Jack Kerouac wrote of an America that celebrated these freedoms.