Jack Kerouac's On the Road and The Dharma Bums

reviewed by Eric D. Lehman

The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

I encountered The Dharma Bums for the first time in college, on a classmate's shelf. She gushed about the book, but I was more interested in her roommate and didn't pay enough attention. Many years later, I finally read it on a lonely road trip through New Hampshire during an unusually cold May. Snow drenched the higher elevations and my camping experience became uncomfortable and risky. I paged through Kerouac's autobiographical novel and wrote two dozen poems. I finished the treasured Beat tome in front of a roaring campfire, beside a bubbling river, before crawling into my sleeping bag. A near-perfect reading experience.

This book is sometimes ignored, due no doubt to its similarity to the more famous On the Road. The sprightly Japhy Rader resembles the more famous Dean Moriarty, though one is based on Gary Snyder and the other Neal Cassady. But this is no retelling, not even a sequel. The Dharma Bums has a charm of its own...from its bookend experiences in the high mountains to its evocative exploration of Buddhism. Of course, the journeys Kerouac's narrators take may be similar. He always seems to be searching for truth. Does he find it? That's up to the reader, but the real lesson is that the search is what is important.

Read this book and listen carefully to Kerouac's barbarous prose. Hear the message both in the words and behind them. Break out of your simple routine and hit the road. Climb a mountain. Fall asleep in a treetop. Meditate for three days. Change your life and broaden your mind. The Beat generation and the counterculture that followed may have had their problems and failures, but at least they tried. And they got one thing absolutely right: life is a journey and if we don't keep moving, we die.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

"I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead." This central character of Kerouac's On the Road, Dean Moriarty, based on Kerouac's friend Neal Cassady, embodies America, its criminal heart, its shuddering sex-crazed body, and its mad hobo soul.

This novel is often cited as the hallmark of the "beat generation" — a term Kerouac despised. But it is not just a record of crazy hipsters and wandering tramps. This book bleeds the madness of jazz and the longing of blues. It feels American, in the way Whitman's Leaves of Grass does. "He woke up with a start at dawn. Off we roared, and an hour later the smoke of Des Moines appeared ahead over the green cornfields." Like all great art, On the Road transforms rogues into heroes and a dying culture into something terrible and romantic.

As the characters roar back and forth in the great triangle of San Francisco, New York, and Mexico City, they find love, they find death, they find each other. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and a host of other writers and artists enter and leave the hip, infinite dance. But this is really an homage to Neal Cassady, the madman of the American road, a man who took life deep into his belly with one great "Yaaaas!"

Where have you gone Neal Cassady? Are you driving on a dark road or playing an endless game of pool or kissing gone girls in brown saloons? What dreaming America do you prophecy now? Is death better than the wild romps of Denver backlots of your youth?

Come back to us.

About Eric D. Lehman

Eric D. Lehman is Professor of English at the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut and has previously published reviews, essays, fiction, and poetry in various journals, such as Hackwriters, Umbrella, Artistry of Life, Red River Review, Identity Theory, Entelechy, Switchback, and Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal. He is also the editor of Groundswell and the Connecticut Literary Collective.

More Beat Reviews!

Read more of Eric's book reviews:

• A Coney Island of the Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
• Tristessa by Jack Kerouac
• Dr. Sax by Jack Kerouac
• Big Sur by Jack Kerouac