My feelings for Jack Kerouac's On the Road can be summed up in a saying by the ever-truthful Ms. Paris Geller
I don't understand the obsession with Mr. Kerouac's "masterpiece". While I found some of the passages here hauntingly marvelous, scarfing down two-hundred pages of Sal and Dean's endless trips across America and back in less than a day, over time I see Sal and Dean for the men they truly are: hypocrites, trying to get down with the common American man, but at the same time deriding them in their own incoherent, racist, misogynist, pretentious drug-filled haze of a "novel". The book becomes a behemoth to me, even though it's only three hundred pages long, because I don't feel any sympathies for the characters after I realized that these two are bums, worse than bums really, because at least bums are willing to work for money and they generally are a-okay with calling themselves bums. All these two do is mooch off from their aunt, wives, relatives, and friends and still have the gall to present themselves as independent American men and make fun of, in their own patronizing way, poor people who don't know any better.
I vent my frustration about this book to a friend who likes it. She admitted that the book is hard to read, probably because Mr. Kerouac wrote it while he was high on cocaine, and yes, Sal and Dean are misogynist pricks, but she encouraged me to finish it because in the end it's a good story. I'll admit that on the surface On the Road tell a good story. I can see why some people like it because I do sympathize with Sal and Dean's plight, I do, really: losing yourself on the road, having an adventure of self-discovery, generally giving society a big middle finger, I'm all for that. But the way it's written in this book is so caked with middle-class white male entitlement that I basically rolled my eyes every time I turn over a new page. Their plight and experience has become childish to me. How can I muster any sympathy for a middle-class white heterosexual male who wants to be as free as a Black man in the antebellum South? To me, they are nothing but man-children instead of the heroes they think themselves as.
Not to mention, the way women is written in this book is vile. We exist, apparently, only as the motherly aunt who supports her good-for-nothing nephew through everything, or the gullible hot girlfriend who swooned and giggled at Sal and Dean's "charming" ministrations and declarations of love only to be abandoned when they decided to hit the road again very impulsively. The way Sal and Dean goes about "gurls, gurls, gurls", how they commented about the breasts of every women they encountered, and how "fresh" sixteen-year-old girls are (even though they are grown men probably in their early thirties) is honestly sickening and it's one of the reasons that it took me nearly six months to finish the book. Sal and Dean doesn't treat women like human beings; they treat them as trophies and treasures that's an extension of themselves. And don't even get me started with how they treat POC (see: the entirety of their Mexican trip).
I can see this book's appeal, why it resonates to so many people, but in the end, its pretentiousness, misogyny, racism, and general entitlement, sours me. That, and the fact that I have to incur a massive library fine for returning the book nearly six months after the due date.
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