"The universe is a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls..."

It is not enough to simply affirm that Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a reflection of the events which transpired throughout his life. He had deep within his soul an impregnable aspiration to digest the essence of Experience and its mysticism. What is perpetually sought after in Kerouac's Beat Generation is what Dean Moriarty describes as IT, an inner revelation of finding oneself while being trapped in a world of spiritual decadence.
"...Kerouac himself was the epitome of Dean Moriarty with all the fits, stops and all the forces which compelled Moriarty to try to corner IT, to burn,
burn, burn" (Hipkiss 422).

Dean and his close amigo, Sal Paradise, reach some degree of ecstasy when they travel, because everything they do is left to the last minute. They find it quite difficult to ruminate over every aspect of every moment because there is simply too much verve, too much life for them to swallow at once. Though, when they acquire the taste they have been looking for, they will
fathom IT and love IT and love life.
   The Beat Quest, as critic Robert Hipkiss calls Kerouac's quest for Experience, is a search for interminable bliss and social heroism. These visions are analogous to a "child's vision of innocence that cannot come again but which Kerouac desperately holds onto as the only true vision of purity and goodness in a corrupt world" (2). During the procession of On the Road, Sal Paradise says, "The one that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss [lost innocence] that was probably experienced
in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death" (Kerouac 124). In this vision is the assent that "the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time" (Hipkiss 8) are indeed the most intimate with God. Thus, the Beat Generation, as well as Kerouac, was religious, in the notion that it lived to convalesce its spirit. To consummate this ideal one "digs" the beatitude of Experience; the utmost ecstatic condition is, certainly, found in the womb of
death.

Unfortunately, Sal and Dean don't procure everything they want out of life. Fearing that Time may defeat them, they do everything expeditiously. Hipkiss describes Dean as having a "passion" for speed; thus, he cannot digest his life on the road because he won't slow down for Time. Dean tries to make it "over every bush and fence and farmhouse and sometimes taking quick lashes to the hills and back without losing a moment's ground" (209). Dean apprehends the danger of stasis, where settling down in life will promise no change. Thus, he is always on the move and does things capriciously. Hipkiss says, "As Kerouac describes his days on the railroad, he was always running to catch a train, running to throw a switch, running back from a farmer's field with a stolen prune, always running 'happy,' as he says" (40). Kerouac spent his entire youth on the road, evincing his "visionary sensibility" (Donaldson 314).

It seems that the climactic point in On the Road materializes when the concept of denudation takes heed. Sal and Dean undress themselves occasionally while driving, and, when they are in the dank jungles of Mexico, Sal sleeps on top of the car, unclad. He describes himself as becoming a part of the jungle, where they coalesce into a spiritual phantasmagoria. Likewise, art and action, according to John Tytell, become fused together. To the Beat Generation, nakedness alludes the soul, exposed, which symbolizes IT: rebirth
(a parallel to death) and the salvation of self- identity. Where the aristocrat jeers at the contingency of life imitating art, the bohemian will affirm that life is art, where nature is the painter's canvas, the body, the paint, and the brush, the soul. In Jazz, the musician and the instrument, being One, are the soul, and the notes, the body.

Ideal love and equanimity were a puissant impetus in the Beat Quest. The dearth of caritas motivated the Generation's desire for self-indulgence. In the mystical Beat vision, love was a crystalization of what Hipkiss believes is the "ecstatic union with the Universe and God" (61). Novelist and critic, John Clellon Holmes, believes that the Beat Generation is nothing more than
a religious generation. The mere condition of itinerancy construes the fact that these bohemians are exploring the realms of their souls, trying to hold fast to a strong belief that comforts them, secures them.

The Beat Quest in _On the Road_ also implicates one's search for a surrogate father: "But it [On the Road] is also an expression of the prototypical American settler who came to this continent with a fervent and abiding trust in a deeply spiritual but very remote Father..." (Donaldson 384). Throughout the novel, Dean searches for his long, lost father, Old Dean Moriarty, yet never finds him. Sal treats Dean as if he is a surrogate brother, or even a father-figure. Christians regard Jesus as their spiritual Father, so the Beat Quest is, indeed, a religious quest, a quest for God: "...Dean's search, emotional and disorganized as it is, is all the same, the saintly heroic search for something holy, something lasting, something that will bring a genuine tranquility to himself and to the world" (409).

Because Dean delineates a holy bather, he is surely a symbol of God: "'The road to heaven' begins on the strip of concrete between Denver and San Francisco, heaven turns out to be located in Mexico, and God appears onstage in the [person] of Dean himself" (Nicosia 347).
   The Cadillac that Dean drives appeals to him not because of financial value, but because of its tremendous speed capacity: "Dean 'uses up' the Cadillac searching for the essence of motion... by means of it he may attain to whatever spiritual reality lies beyond it" (Donaldson 409). When Dean drives, he becomes a Father of the Beat Movement; he wants Sal and the other passengers to capture the quintessence of his soul and his energy, and hang on! When he walks, he leads: "He leaped out of the car. Furiously he hustled into the railroad station; we followed sheepishly... He had become absolutely mad in his movements; he seemed to be doing everything at the same time. It was a shaking of the head, up and down, sideways; jerky, vigorous hands; quick walking, sitting, crossing the legs, uncrossing, getting up, rubbing the hands, rubbing his fly, hitching his pants, looking up and saying 'Am,' and sudden slitting of the eyes to see everywhere; and all the time he was grabbing me by the ribs and talking, talking" (424).

Traveling, whether by car or by foot, is the intrinsic medium for the Beat; it enables him to pervade deep within the soul, and to "suck out all the marrow of life." Critic Gerald Nicosia says, "The road simply reflects back the self, and it is a finer mirror even than the poet's own language" (344). The mere taste of freedom on the road gives one reason to live. And to love.

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Bibliography

Hipkiss, Robert A. Jack Kerouac: Prophet of the New Romanticism.
   The Regents Press of Kansas (Lawrence), 1976.

Donaldson, Scott, Ed.. Jack Kerouac: On the Road - Text and Criticism.
    The Viking Press (New York), 1979.

Nicosia, Gerald. Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac.
    Grove Press, Inc. (New York), 1983.