Book #51: On the Road by Jack Kerouac

Okay, so here's a confession. I didn't actually finish this book. I read 1/3 of the way through it and after reading some reviews of it, I feel like what I read is representative of the rest of the book and I am not interested in wasting more of my life on this book when there are other, better books I want to read. So I did NOT like this book and I don't really think it's worth the energy.

This book is one of those "top 100" books that make those book lists all the time, because of its place as a defining novel of a certain generation and time in American history. That really is the only reason people recommend it and read it. The writing follows the narrator's stream-of-consciousness and is therefore muddled and really unnecessarily verbose in places. And the story--the story is just a very thinly disguised memoir of Kerouac's travels across America after WWII with his buddies. The narrator, Sal Paradise, follows around the wild and crazy Dean Moriarty around America and they spend their lives just hitchhiking around the country, sleeping with random girls, doing drugs, spending all their money, stealing cars and food, and talking about life. Besides that I fundamentally disagree with their lifestyle and how ridiculous and presumptuous they seem, I found the characters to be super problematic, chauvinistic, and crazily unaware of how horrible they are to everyone around them. I just could not believe how often they just breezed into somewhere, got drunk, hurt other people's lives or even destroyed or ruined them, and then just disappeared and moved on to something else. This is the problem with the ridiculous Beat Generation, hitchhiking and road-traveling lifestyle that the book promotes--if everyone fell to the premises that are shared in this book and started living this way, society would absolutely fall apart with everyone's irresponsible and damaging habits. I really hated the way the characters acted and I really didn't want to read any more. The rest of the book was all exactly the same and there was no need to read any further.

I will say that if I were willing to put in energy into analyzing and studying and actually paying attention to the characters of the book, that I'm sure there are some redeeming and interesting things to learn about the Beat Generation and the mindset of WWII vets and America in general after the war, but I will leave that to other people to do and just assume they're taking care of it.