BEATitudes

This review has been saved as a draft for weeks. I'm only writing this down because I really don't want to forget how this book made me.... feel (There's like no way to not sound like a chump about it, but whatever).


Jack Kerouac's On the Road was an interesting read simply because by the end of it I managed to hold it in high regard... despite not liking about 85% of the book. That's pretty crafty and effective writing, Monsieur Kerouac.

cons:

• The characters aren't particularly likable. For the most part, if they were real people I wouldn't want to be friends with them.
• The prose tends to get too dizzying for me. I'm sure the shit load of run-on sentences with little staccato sentences in between are meant to imitate the burgeoning jazz era that was the cultural background of this generation. The syntax is probably meant to feel spontaneous, exciting, and uncaged. But more times than not, all it really did was just make me feel anxious.

pros:

• When I researched up on the Beatnik generation, I found them to be fascinating. Even though I personally could live without their excessive recreational drug use and sex, I understand their significance to American culture. They were a historical reaction to the generation before them: which had been largely materialistic and socially uniform. They were a young group of intellects who put lot of stock into expanding their minds (insert whatever justification for casual sex, recreational drugs, and overall hedonism here). 
• I loved the religious allusions. Before even picking up this book, I had thought it to be a sort of hipster bible. But in actuality, it is written to be a sort of bible all its own because it professes a new world order and how one finds salvation in the modern world. Dean Moriarty is the obvious Christ figure, although not in the traditional sense of him being sinless. He is crazy, enigmatic, and revolutionary. Dean believes that being "beat" (a word that meant to describe hitchhikers, vagabonds, and the poor in the 50's) shouldn't be received with disdain. Instead, those who live modestly and those who are down-trotted are in fact the blessed ones.
• The overall message of humble and simple living really resonates with me. The following quote is a small speech said by Dean where he gives an example of the people who need to be saved. 

"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. But they need to worry and betray time with urgencies false and otherwise, purely anxious and whiny, their souls really won't be at peace unless they can latch on to an established and proven worry and having once found it they assume facial expressions to fit and go with it, which is, you see, unhappiness, and all the time it all flies by them and they know it and that too worries them no end."

That quote didn't show up until the second half of the book, but I know reading that passage was the pivotal moment for me. Suddenly, I didn't feel like all 170-something pages I had read prior were purposeless. For the first half of the book, I felt like I was wandering aimlessly for some vague answer to some unknown yet burning question. But after coming across this small passage, I felt strangely at peace.

So what made me adore this book wasn't the story line. It wasn't so much the characters. And while the writing is poetic and creative... it wasn't even so much that. It was the sequence of sensations I felt while reading. I felt lost and then at some point in the very middle of it all, I was found. Is there some sort of metaphorical life lesson to be learned from the perceptions I felt while in the act of reading a book?

I only underlined that to emphasize how truly stoked I am about great writing, haha.