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The Importance Of Travel In Jack Kerouac's On The Road

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Life is an Adventure Wind in your hair, in the back of a truck going 70 through the mountains of Colorado with people you have never met before. This is just one of the pictures Jack Kerouac Paints for us in his most popular novel, On the Road. In On the Road the main character is Sal Paradise, he goes on many adventures hitchhiking across the country and learns to love the people he meets and the experiences he has. His friend Dean is also another important character in the last 3 quarters of the book… Dean goes on a very similar journey to Sal but they are together having amazing experiences. One question has arrived for many after reading this book… Did Kerouac use this book to show the importance of home or the importance of traveling …show more content…

In the book Kerouac shows how the characters develop to learn this themselves… ""Ah Sal if you could sit with me high in the Basque country with a cool bottle of Poignon Dix-neuf, then you 'd know there are other things besides boxcars." "I know that. It 's just that I love boxcars and I love to read the names on them like Missouri Pacific, Great Northern, Rock Island Line. By Gad, Major, if I could tell you everything that happened to me hitching here."" This is Sal talking to his friend, Major, he explains that he wish he could explain everything that happened to him on his journey because he realizes how amazing it was. “ 'On the Road ' paints a utopian view of America the way Jack Kerouac wanted it to be. His characters are free to travel and do as they please and blacks and whites interrelate without racism. This new American dream is examined.” This is a quote from Mark Richardson, a critic. He explains how he believes Kerouac is using the book to show the way Kerouac wanted to world to be, free, exciting, spontaneous, and beautiful in the exploration of the …show more content…

For the next few chapters Sal was with these people in the back of the truck having some amazing experiences. “He expresses the spirit of the 1950s for an audience aimlessly seeking a suitable mode of expression. Kerouac 's depiction of a band of free spirits discovering themselves as they improvised their way across America in what was intended to be a real-life analogue to a jazz-ensemble improvisation struck a chord with young iconoclastic readers. Kerouac became a representative figure, the king of the Beats.” This is a quote from Judith Baughman, another critic of the book. She explains how this book reflected the “spirit of the

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