Summary of the Work
My name is Saul, I'm a writer living on the East Coast in New York City, and I've always dreamed of traveling west. Dean happened to be from the West, and he was wild and crazy, fresh out of the penitentiary and interested in Nietzsche. He and I hit it off right away and decided he would be an ideal traveling companion. Dean returned to Denver and, in order to follow his trail, I made my first trip across the continental United States. Since then, I've been on the road constantly, sometimes alone, sometimes meeting up with Dean to travel with him, and sometimes inviting more friends to join us. We've traveled from east to west, west to east, by train, by car, by hitchhiking, by foot, meeting all sorts of *** passersby, experiencing all sorts of crazy, uninhibited sensations. We stole, we drank, we did drugs, we got laid, we were wild and uninhibited. In Dean's speeding car, we became obsessed with the madness that comes from speed ***. On our last long trip, we went to Mexico, a land of simplicity where we seemed to have come to the end of the road. Dean decided to go back to his three wives, which meant we were saying goodbye to our life on the road. Later, my girlfriend and I moved to San Fransisco, where we met one last time with Dean, who had come especially to see me. I know I will always miss Dean.
Selected Works
After a year or so, I saw Dean again. I had been writing at home for a while and had gone back to school on a VA grant, and on Christmas Day, 1948, my aunt and I went to Virginia to visit my brother with all sorts of gifts. This was something I had written to Dean about, and he had said he was going back east. I told him he would find me in Testmont, Virginia if he was in the East during the Christmas and New Year's period. One day I was sitting around the parlor in Testmont talking with my southern relatives. These frail men and women had the old Southern look in their eyes. They seemed listless as they chattered in low voices about the weather, the harvest, who had a baby, who had built a new house, and so on. Suddenly, a mud-splattered Hudson 49 came down the dusty road and came to a screeching halt in front of the house. I didn't even think about who it could be. Out of the car came a sturdy but tired young man with bloodshot eyes, an unshaven beard, and a tattered T-shirt. He came to the front door and rang the bell. I opened the door and instantly recognized it as Dean. It was surprising that he had come so quickly from San Fran to the door of my brother Rock's house in Virginia, since I had just written him a letter telling him where I was. There were two other people asleep in the car. "My God! Dean, who's in the car?" "Haha, man, it's Mary Lou and Eddie Dunkle. Hurry up and find us a place to take a shower and some food, we're starving."
"But how did you guys get here so fast?"
"Ah, man, we're driving a Hudson!"
"Where did you get it."
"I bought it with my savings. I've been working on the railroad, making $400 a month."
Confusion ensued. My Southern relatives who couldn't figure out what was going on or who Dean, Marylou, and Eddie Dunkle were looked on dumbfounded. My aunt and brother Rock ran to the kitchen to discuss what to do. There were eleven people crammed into the tiny south way house. Not only that, but my brother had decided to move and half the furniture was gone. He and his wife and children were going to move closer to the city of Testmont, and they had bought a new set of living room furniture, and the old one was going to be shipped to my aunt's house in Patterson. But it hadn't been decided exactly how it would be shipped. As soon as Dean heard about it, he immediately said he could ship it in that Hudson. He and I could ship the furniture to Patterson, and send my aunt home in the meantime, thus saving half the money and a great deal of trouble. This suggestion was immediately accepted. My sister-in-law cooked a sumptuous meal. The three poor travelers devoured it. Marylou hasn't slept since she left Denver. I thought she looked much older than before, but also much prettier.
Later I learned that Dean had been living with Cemil since the fall of 1947, and they were living happily. Dean got a job on the railroad and made a lot of money. Soon he became a father again and they had a delightful little girl, Amy Moriarty. One day he was walking down the street when he suddenly saw in front of him a Hudson Model 49 automobile being sold at a reduced price. He immediately rushed to the bank and withdrew his entire savings and bought the car. At that time, Eddie Dunkle was with him all the time. Now they were left without a dime. Dean managed to get Cemil to stop worrying about it and then told her he was going away for a month. "I'm going to New York to bring Saul back." Cemil wasn't too keen on him doing that.
"Why is this? Why are you doing this to me?"
"No reason. No reason. Here's the thing, dear, Saul has been begging me to fetch him, and I need it badly - but we can't fulfill these plans - and I'll tell you why. ...... Oh, listen, I'll tell you why that is." He told her why. All irrelevant reasons, of course.
The tall Eddie Dunkle also worked on the railroad. He and Dean are fired from their jobs simply because of a random accident, as they have gotten into trouble with their coworkers around them. Eddie meets a girl named Gelati who lives in San Fran on her own little savings. These two lunatics want to take her back east with them so they can use her money. Eddie coaxed and cajoled, but she was determined not to go unless Eddie married her. So Eddie Dunkle blitzed and married Gelati. Dean, on the other hand, went around and put a necessary message in the paper. A few days before Christmas they drove out of San Fransisco at seventy miles an hour, straight to Los Angeles. Then it was back on the snow-free southern highways. They pulled a traveler into a travel agency in Los Angeles who asked for a ride to Indiana. They pulled him a ways and asked for $15 for gas. They gave another woman and her *** daughter a ride to Arizona and asked for $4.00. Dean sat up front with the silly girl and talked to her, and he said, "Really, man, she's a real cute chick. Oh, we talked all the way to heaven about the fires and the desert and her parrot that could curse in Spanish." With these passengers gone, they continued on to Tuckson. Along the way Galati Dunkel, Eddie's new wife, kept complaining that she was so tired she wanted to sleep at the motel. If that happened, it would cost her all her money before they got to Virginia. Two nights in a row she was adamant about stopping and spending $10 each at the motel. By the time they got to Tucson, she didn't have a dime left on her. So Dean and Eddie left her in the hallway of a motel and drove a traveler, full of themselves, back on the road.
Eddie is a big, steady, clueless guy. He was ready to do anything Dean asked him to do. At this time Dean was in a deep state of unrest. He was traveling through Las Cruces, New Mexico, when he had the strange idea of seeing his lovely first wife, Mary Lou, again. She lived in Denver. So he turned the car around and headed north over the objections of his passengers. When he arrived in Denver at night, he asked around and finally found Mary Lou in a hotel. For the next ten hours or so they went wild *** and it was settled: they were going to live together again. Mary Lou was the only girl Dean had ever really loved. The sight of her face made him feel guilty as hell. He knelt at her feet begging for forgiveness for the past, trying to win her back. She, on the other hand, kept rubbing Dean's hair. She understood him and knew that he sometimes went crazy. To comfort the passenger, Dean found him a girl and booked him a room in a hotel. On the ground floor of the hotel was a bar where a group of old gamblers used to go on drinking binges. But the passenger refused the girl and left on foot in the night. They never saw him again, and apparently he took a bus to Indiana.
Dean, Marylou, and Eddie Dunkle traveled east on Colfax and then across the Kansas plains. On the way, they encountered a huge snowstorm. By the time they got to Missouri, Dean had to wrap a scarf around his head while driving at night and then drive with his head out the window because the windshield was covered with an inch of ice. He had to stare at the road ahead in the wind and snow. He was impassive as the car drove past the birthplace of his ancestors. In the morning, the car drove up an ice-covered hill. On the way down, it slid into a roadside ditch. A farm worker came and helped them push the car up. On the way, they met another man who asked for a ride and said he promised to pay them a dollar if they took him to Memphis. When they got to his house in Memphis he looked around for money to get something to drink. Finally he said he couldn't find it. So Dean and the boys got back on the road and went through Tennessee. Traffic was backed up ahead because of an accident. Dean had been driving at 90 miles per hour, but now had to limit his speed to 70 miles per hour or the car would have had to roll over into a ditch, and they went over the Smoky Mountains in the dead of winter. By the time they reached my brother's doorstep, they hadn't eaten in over 30 hours - except for a little candy and cheese crackers.
They wolfed it down. Dean, sandwich in hand, stood in front of the jukebox, bobbing his head to a pop record I'd just gotten back called Hunting. The record was mastered by Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray. They sang vocally in front of a frenzied audience, giving the record a magical quality. The Southerners around them looked at each other and shook their heads uneasily, "What kind of friends Saul has made." They said to my brother. He couldn't answer either. Southerners didn't like wild young men, especially ones like Dean. Dean, however, cared nothing for them, and his craziness was at its peak, which I didn't realize until he and I sped off in the Hudson with Marylou and Dunkle. At that point, it was just the few of us together, and we could talk at will again. Dean clutched the steering wheel tightly and pondered for a moment, as if he had suddenly decided something. He drove the car and put it into second gear. The car followed this frantic decision and arrowed down the highway in a windy fashion.
"There now, boys." He said, wiping his nose as he drove bowlegged, handing each of them a cigarette as his body kept rocking. "It's time we decided what we're going to do next week. It's a critical time, a critical time. Aha!" He passed a minibus with an old black man sitting on it, driving slowly. "Hey!" Dean called out, "Hey! Quick look! Now, what's his soul thinking-let's think about it." Then he slowed down the car so that we could look back at the poor old man. "Oh, look, how sweet he is. I'm thinking of many, many things now. I know the poor fellow must be estimating the turnips and hams this year. Saul, you wouldn't understand any of this. I lived with a farmhand in Arkansas for a whole year when I was eleven years old and had to do all the chores. I skinned a dead horse once, and I left Arkansas on Christmas Day, 1943, and I haven't been back since. I remember it was five years ago when Bengowen and I tried to steal an automobile, but the owner had a gun on him and we had to run for our lives. I'm saying all this to let you know that I have a say about the South, I know - I mean I know the South, I know all about it. Man, and I've gone over everything you've mentioned about it in the letters you've written me." As he spoke, he got a little confused about where he was going, so he stopped the car, and after checking it out, resumed driving the car to 70 miles per hour, ambling over the steering wheel, his eyes gleaming as he stared straight ahead. Marylou smiled, this was a new and whole Dean, he was maturing. My God, I thought secretly, he's changed, a spark of anger in his eyes whenever he speaks of something he hates; when he's happy, it's replaced with a gleam of joy. Every muscle in his body was twitching nervously at this running around. "Hey, man, I've got to tell you," he said, as he poked me, "hey, man, we've got to make some time-what's happened to Carlo? Honey, we're going to visit Carlo first thing tomorrow. Now, Marylou, we're going to get a little bread and meat, make a meal, and get to New York. Saul, how much money do you have left? We can put the mess in the back, and the gang can all crowd to the front and take turns telling stories. Marylou, little baby, you sit next to me, Saul next to me, and Eddie over by the window. Eddie, the big guy, kept the wind out, and he had his coat on. We're going to start a happy life, and it's high time we did it in time." With that, he wiped his chin. The car passed three trucks with him at the wheel twisting and turning seven times. It swung into Testmont. Without moving his head, just a 180-degree roll of his eyes, he scanned all around and saw a parking lot all at once. So we pulled in. He jumped out of the car and squeezed into the station, and we all obediently followed. He bought a couple packs of cigarettes. It really looked like he was acting a little crazy, doing several things at once, shaking his head back and forth, waving his hand sharply and forcefully, sprinting one minute, then sitting down backwards, scratching his ears, fidgeting, talking out of breath, squinting and looking around, and pestering me with conversation for a while.
It was cold and inexplicably snowy in Testmont. Dean stood on a straight, empty road that ran parallel to the railroad, wearing only a T-shirt and unbelted pants, as if he were about to take them off at any moment. He stuck his head out of the car and chatted with Marylou for a few moments, then retracted, waved her off and said, "Aha, I know you, I know you too well, honey." He laughed so terribly. First he laughed in a low, demented voice, then he let loose a wild laugh, so like a madman, only faster than a madman, and more like a Bean Big. Then he spoke again in a businessman's accent. Our visit to the business center of the city seemed purposeless. But Dean found a purpose, and he sent us on our way. Mary Lou went to the grocery store to buy something to cook, I went to buy a newspaper to check the weather, and Eddie ran to buy cigarettes. Dean loved to smoke. As he read the paper, he lit a cigarette and said, "Haha, here in Washington, we untouchable Americans are always plotting to trick or treat with others." He saw a black girl passing outside the station and rushed over, "Look at that." He called out as he stood there pointing his finger, a goofy smile on his face. "Awww! That's a cute black girl that just passed by." We all got into the car and sped off towards my brother's house.
When we arrived at my brother's house, seeing the beautiful Christmas tree and the assortment of Christmas presents, smelling the sizzling smell of the roasting turkey, and listening to our friends and family talk, I felt the peace and quiet of a country Christmas. This was how I had always spent my previous Christmases, but now, once again, I was jolted out of my intoxication by this villain, whose name was Dean Moriarty. I was yanked back into a life of road wandering.
We put some of the furniture we had at my brother's house in the back of the car and left overnight. We promised to be back in 30 hours - a thousand kilometers from north to south in 30 hours, the way Dean always does it. But the trip was quite grueling, and none of us realized it. The car's heater was broken, and the windshield was covered in ice. While driving at 70 miles per hour, Dean poked out of the car and wiped out a small hole with a rag so he could see the road. "Ha, that's a great hole!" The Hudson was wide enough for all four of us to sit in the front with a blanket over our legs. This type of car was a new brand that came out about five years ago, and now it was old and beat up, and the radio in the car wasn't working. We drove north toward Washington, D.C., onto Highway 301, a freeway of two one-way streets. Dean droned on alone, the others silent. He kept waving his arms, sometimes leaning in to bark at me, sometimes letting go of the steering wheel. But the car still arrowed forward. It didn't even deviate in the slightest from the white line in the center of the road, which stretched under the left front wheel of our car.
It was pointless for Dean to come here, and equally pointless for me to follow him around like this. In New York I could still go to school and flirt with the chicks around me. I met a beautiful Italian woman with beautiful hair named Lucille, and I really wanted to marry her. All these years I had been looking for a woman I wanted to marry, but what kind of wife would she be? I told Dean and Mary Lou about Lucille. Marylou wanted to know all about Lucille and to meet her. We traveled through Richmond, Washington, and Baltimore to a windswept country road in Philadelphia. "I want to marry a chick." I told them, "I really want to rest my soul and grow old with her. We can't keep going on like this, running around so mad, we've got to decide where to go and what to look for."
"Come on, man." Dean said, "I've long since learned over the years about those thoughts you've had about family marriages! And all that moving stuff about your soul." It was a frustrating night. In Philadelphia we went into a restaurant and ate a hamburger with the last bit of money we had. The guy at the counter - it was 3:00 a.m. - overheard us talking about money and offered to give us hamburgers for free, plus coffee, if we'd come inside and wash dishes, since his contracted worker hadn't shown up until now. We immediately agreed. Eddie Dunkle said he was an expert dishwasher. He came to the back and sharply stretched out his long arms to do it. Dean and Marylou stood off to the side with towels in their hands. Before long they were kissing between piles of pots and pans and then ducking back into whatever dark corner of the pantry they could find. The counter guy was pleased with the dishes Eddie and I washed. We did it in fifteen minutes and were done. It was still light out and we had crossed New Jersey. Through the snow in the distance, the huge clouds over the metropolis of New York rose before us. Dean, who had a flannel shirt wrapped around his head, said we were like a bunch of Arabs to New York. We all wanted to go through the Lincoln Tunnel and across to Times Square. Mary Lou wanted to see it. "Oh fuck, I hope we find Hassall. Everyone's eyes are pointy, let's see if we can find him." We scrutinized the road. "This old Hassall is always running around, you're bound to run into him in Texas."
Now, Dean had traveled about four thousand miles in four days from San Fransisco to Arizona to Denver, and had had numerous encounters, but that was only the beginning.
(Translated by Tao Yueqing and He Xiaoli)
Appreciation
Kerouac has been called a representative of the post-World War II American Beat Generation, and On the Road is a masterpiece of this genre. With his characters, the writer has labeled himself as belonging to the group of "Beat Generation". They belonged to the "counterculture" in the United States, i.e., a cultural phenomenon contrary to the mainstream culture, and were the forerunners of the "hippies" who appeared at the end of the 1960s and ran counter to all the moral concepts recognized by the American society at that time in terms of their spirit and behavior. They defended their individuality and expressed themselves, said what they wanted to say, did what they wanted to do, and pursued complete freedom of expression. They loved the feeling of being "on the road" because running was the best way for them to fight against the dreary social status quo. They are ready to hit the road whenever they get the chance, just as Dean and I (Saul) can't wait for the reunion embrace to get cold before they hit the road again in the excerpt. The freedom of the road is for them the greatest temptation and eternal happiness.
Dean, I, Eddie, and the other young people on the road together in the book were all broken by the society of their time, from body to soul. But "broken" for them does not mean that they are at the mercy of the others, but that they have to build their ugly buildings among the ruins of their bodies and souls, and live more fiercely and challengingly with their broken limbs. We see Dean driving the car at 70, 90 miles per hour, and that's far from the top record; he used to take it to 100 miles per hour or even faster. In that windy, high-speed forward rush, the people in the car are heart-breaking and constantly screaming, and the ripping sound is accompanied by ripped nerves, as everyone leaves behind all the worries of reality.
Racing cars is a typical behavior of the Beat Generation. The novel repeatedly describes Dean's driving madness: on the road, he constantly overtakes cars, dashes left and right, and repeatedly creates dangerous situations, and then turns them into a safe one. While the others were scared out of their wits by Dean's madness, only "I" always sat beside him, trusting him and willing to give my life to him. "I enjoy the comfort he gives to me with his speed.
Through the excerpt, the reader gets a clear sense that Dean was speed himself, that he had an unstoppable impulse that manifested itself in life as a shooting, dizzying energy and enthusiasm. "Every muscle in his body quivered with the tension of this life of running around." As soon as Dean makes his debut, the narrative beat of the novel picks up noticeably, and the events that surround Dean are told in a tightly-constructed fashion. Dean himself speaks like a firecracker, in keeping with his fast-paced physical movements and feisty personality traits. He has the ability to sway and lead and is adept at giving orders. He is the leader of this group of young men.
For me, he was even more extraordinary: he was my destination, the force that kept me on the road. When I first crossed the continental U.S., I ran toward Dean. "I loved Dean and his passionate approach to life, and even though he acted almost deranged, I knew that it was madness for the sake of being at home and living life to the fullest. Often, Dean would buy a car just because he liked it and would not hesitate to spend his entire savings on it, no matter where tomorrow's bread was. This seemingly crazy behavior, on second thought, is the true meaning of dashing, representing a group of people of a valuable **** nature: refused to be a material puppet, refused to be a slave to money. The novel describes Dean as having a "persistent, resolute face and gleaming eyes". How could such a person be a madman? Dean was a fire, a thunderbolt, and wherever he went, he just burned, burned, burned!
The excerpt shows Dean on the road with his ex-wife, Marylou, and leaving his current wife, Cemil, at home. In addition to these two women, he has a third wife, Inez. On the surface the writer seems to be writing about a philandering, unfaithful man in love, but it is clear that the deeper meaning is never there. In the novel, the writer has repeatedly written that "I" and Dean and others believe that "life is sacred and every moment of life is precious" and "life is serious and everyone is doing something to replace boredom ". The Deans chose to indulge, but did not fritter away their lives and play with them. They chose their own way to fight boredom and live seriously in what they determined to be a seemingly absurd way. Throughout the novel, Dean is torn between three named wives and a number of passing women, unsure of which woman he loves more. What he is sure of, however, is that once he chooses a particular woman, he should give that woman up. Divorce one wife and marry another in order to be able to live more vigorously with that divorced wife. This is the logic of the Deans - to keep their relationships, their marriages, and the whole of their lives always flying by the seat of their pants, and when they reach an end point, they must destroy that end point so that they can embark on a new beginning.
There are times when "I" is more compromised than Dean. As the reader sees in the excerpt, "I" has plans to get married and wants to give his soul a break. "I feel that we can't keep running around like this, we should decide where we want to go and what we want to find. Timely fun is the rule of thumb for our group, but when it comes to quiet time, no marijuana to anesthetize ourselves, no women to fuck us up, no flying cars to *** ourselves, "I" is constantly puzzled about where they are going. "Where are they going? "What are they doing? "Why? For them, these are unanswered questions, things they are avoiding and inquiring about at the same time. In fact, they don't want to hurt life and destroy themselves. On the contrary, they want to live well and treat life well. Yes, they are a group of people who treat life well, not incompetent and passive misanthropists. In the face of the deadly social reality, they have to use all kinds of extreme ways to proclaim their existence by stirring up the stagnant water and stirring up the dust. When the dust flutters and the stagnant water swirls, it becomes something alive, and it is energized. They urge themselves over and over again to walk on the road, to act, to shout, to run, but they don't know where that road leads and what they will get in the end; they don't want to be knocked down by mediocrity, but they end up becoming a slow-nerved, cooled-down, conformist and honest person - this may be exactly where their confusion lies. It is likely that for them, this is the real motivation that stirs up the anger in their hearts and consequently, they fight against it. However, who can really understand their bewilderment behind the clamor? Even Dean, who always laughed and roared his way through life no matter what the circumstances were, no matter how much trouble he was in, had tears in his eyes one day, because a road without an end doesn't always mean hilarity, and it doesn't always heal people's lonely souls. "The Beat Generation is still a tragedy full of laughter for these young people.
In this novel, the writer uses the technique of "random writing", which gives the impression that he writes what he sees, without filtering, without refining, without technical treatment of details. It is like a running account of a traveler's journey, with all the links experienced registered and chattered about. Going to a place, meeting some people, going on the road, leaving some people, leaving a string of names, but also leaving a piece of drowsy, plain story, no legend, not shocking audio-visual. Certain passages in the work do make the reader feel bored, creating a kind of anxiety inside, and the dreariness brought about by exhaustion and triviality dilutes the attraction of the work. However, the novel is worth re-reading again and again in retrospect, and some feelings and sentiments will slowly rise from the bottom of one's heart in the process. The whole novel ends in a sentence like "I miss Dean Moriarty", which is bland at first reading and long aftertaste, making people feel infinite frustration.
Most of the environmental descriptions in the novel are bright and colorful, and the scenery is delightful. "The sun is rising in the sky, the cool air has a purple glow, and the golden clouds are changing colors. The hillsides were slightly reddish, and the pastures in the valleys were bright green." The writer is good at using rich colors to sketch the natural scenery, conveying the character's desire to love life and cherish it. At the same time, the sense of madness and haste brought to the reader by the characters' actions and words is magically buffered and dissolved the moment the writer turns to the description of the scenic environment. The alternation of these two extreme states of reading experience helps the reader to relax, and can also be seen as a way for the characters in the book to regulate their own emotions. It periodically allows one to escape from the burn of the refining fire and allows for proper rest and recovery of the mind and emotions. This moment of healing can prevent the heart from turning to ashes and schizophrenia. The unique landscapes of the Great Plains and valleys of the United States and the customs of the various state capitals become a point of interest in the book. Since it is on the road, it is a person on the journey, this scenery eventually becomes a component that should not be missing.
(Sun Yue)
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