On the Road

by Jack Kerouac
Hennepin County Library audiobook 9 discs
read by Will Patton
genre: realistic fiction

This is one of those books I've heard of but never read before. Besides his name, I only knew the phrase "beat generation" in relation to this work of fiction. I didn't like it and I want to do some reading online to figure out why it was/is such a commonly referenced work of fiction. Below are my stream-of-consciousness notes written while I was driving . . . I know, not safe. But I can jot without looking at my hand.

Beat Generation / hipster - set in 1947, when was it written?
Too many characters! Why mention every single person they hung out with? Who cares?
"Yo!" gun / "queers" in a bar in San Fran / alcohol (throughout the entire book - they consumed a LOT of alcohol)
Of Mice and Men reference . . . Billie Holliday Lover Man
What did Sal's aunt think of all the comings and goings? Why did she put up with it?
Dean is mentally ill.
Music - important to the characters, progression of styles, interesting historically
Drug culture of 1940s, 50s - really?! I didn't think there was much of that going on. But perhaps the fact that Kerouac wrote about it was part of what made this book such a big deal - he acknowledged a part of society that most people pretended didn't exist?
Stealing / speeding / delinquents . . . I don't like Dean, Sal, or Ed very much.
Negroes - admiring tone AND racist attitudes . . .
"fags"
"It's not my fault." - Seriously?! Haven't you people heard of personal responsibility?
Generation . . . selfishness and self-centeredness
Degenerates
Some very beautiful language in places. Is Sal the writer based on Kerouac himself? It seems so.
Wanderlust. Across the country and back again. Repeat. Mexico.
Mexican whorehouse - conscience? Yuk. These guys are jerks. And drunks.
Why does Dean bother to get married?!?!?! Mary Lou, Camille, Inez. Four babies with three women and he's not sticking around to help any of them.
Sal Paradise - cool name.
Ending - what happened to Dean?
Why was Sal always such a patsy, letting life happen to him and following the younger Dean around as though he were amazing?

Okay - time to read *about* the book so I have a better understanding of why it matters in American literature.

From Wikipedia (with hyperlinks removed):
"On the Road is a novel by American writer Jack Kerouac, based on the travels of Kerouac and his friends across America. It is considered a defining work of the postwar Beat and Counterculture generations, with its protagonists living life against a backdrop of jazz, poetry, and drug use. The novel, published in 1957, is a roman à clef, with many key figures in the Beat movement, such as William S. Burroughs (Old Bull Lee) and Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx) represented by characters in the book, including Kerouac himself as the narrator Sal Paradise."