Investigating The Style And Technique Employed By

Jack Kerouac In ‘On The Road’ Essay, Research Paper

On the Road by Jack Kerouac is a fresh and captivating novel which follows the life of Sal Paradise as he sets to the roads of America to escape the repetition of every day life. His journeys become a quest for new experiences and a new way of living, crossing both moral and legal boundaries in search for true freedom. Kerouac uses many techniques to attempt to convey the theme of personal freedom as well as to achieve freedom of expression. Jack Kerouac applies an original, spontaneous style of writing to his novels which helps him to convey his themes. His brilliant use of imagery and his vibrant characterisations also allows him to easily express his feelings and ideas in a way that could not have been achieved otherwise.

One aspect of On the Road which allows Kerouac to express the theme of personal freedom is use of a spontaneous method of writing. This method creates a free flowing rhythm and structure, which emphasises the theme of personal freedom due to it s loose style and ability to capture the true feelings of the author as he writes. This original style was used by Kerouac in order subconsciously to express the thoughts of the mind in a continually flowing way without the constraints of the traditional rules of writing. Kerouac stated that when writing using this method one must never afterthink to improve or defray impressions because the best writing is always wrung-out , tossed from cradle , from the song of yourself. Text written in this

original way effectively conveys the emotion and energy of the author as well as allowing the reader to empathise greatly with the story. On the Road is written entirely using the spontaneous prose technique. An example of this is the final paragraph in the novel. It contains only one long sentence seperated by many commas and conveys the natural spontaneous thoughts of the main character, Sal Paradise, as he thinks of his old friend, Dean Moriarty:

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old-broken down river pier watching the long, long skies over new New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going…all the people dreaming in the immensity of it…and tonight the stars ll be out, and don t you know that God is Pooh Bear. the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims over the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows whats going to happen to anybody beside the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty…

This extract effectively conveys the sincerity of the characters feelings and shows how well Jack Kerouac s technique can portray free, spontaneous thought. For Kerouac, jazz is the ideal model for complete spontaneity and he states that the ideal procedure for writing spontaneous prose is blowing(as per jazz musician) on the subject of image ; when he removes the conscious mind from

interfering with writing and just blows, the result is language undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret-idea words. Kerouac uses the term blowing instead of playing in his analogy of writing and jazz and the distinction is an important one. Playing connotes a more involved thought process whereas blowing implies a more direct, more intense, less thoughtful, more emotional style of play. An example of Jack Kerouacs attempt to write in a jazz-like style is when he is describing the performance of a band in an obscure backstreet Jazz club:

The behatted tenorman was blowing at the peak of a wonderfully satisfactory free idea, a rising and falling riff that went from EE-yah! to a crazier EE-de-lee-yah! and blasted along to the rolling crash of the butt-scarred drums hammered by a big brutal Negro with a bullneck who didn t give a damn about anything but punishing his busted tubs, crash, rattle-ti-boom, crash. Uproars of music and the tenorman had it and everybody knew he had it… He just hauled back and stamped his foot and blew down a hoarse, baughing blast, and drew breath, and raised the horn and blew high, wide, and screaming in the air.

This extract shows how Kerouac uses language to parallel the playing of a Jazz musician using the punctuation to convey the rhythmic breath of the tenor horn player. Kerouac also skilfully uses rhythm to portray the intensity of the performance and the citation shows how Kerouac was interested in the flowing of words, often rejecting the general rules of writing in order to have complete freedom in his novels. It is because of this that Kerouac can sincerely portray personal freedom and he has achieved the freedom of expression that he could not have achieved by writing in any other way.

Another aspect of Kerouacs style which allows him to express the theme of personal freedom is his imaginative use of imagery to create a detailed portrait of every situation. The main contributor to this imagery is Kerouac s extensive, though necessary, detailed description which brings every situation to life and effectively conveys the feelings of Sal Paradise throughout the novel. Kerouac s brilliant descriptive ability is shown when the main character makes a trip to Mexico. Jack Kerouac describes how exposed Sal Paradise is to his new surrounding world and deeply p