"“It’s not my fault! Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don’t you see that? I don’t want it to be and it can’t be and it won’t be”
Jacket Copy: In its time Kerouac's masterpiece was the Bible of the Beat Generation, the essential prose accompaniment to Allen Ginsberg's Howl. Now a modern classic, its American Dream is nearer that of Whitman than Scott Fitzgerald; and it goes racing toward the sunset with unforgettable exuberance, poignancy, and autobiographical passion. On the Road swings to the rhythms of fifties underground America, jazz, sex, generosity, chill dawns, and drugs with Sal Paradise and his hero Dean Moriarty, traveler and mystic, the living epitome of Beat.
Similar to: Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath; Don DeLillo's Americana; Nathanael West
Highlights:
--beautiful, poetic, detailed descriptions of the American West
--the narrator takes a very objective (rather than subjective) approach to telling the story; he doesn't make a lot of evaluations of people's actions, he simply describes things factually as they happened. This allows the reader to make his or her own judgments
--this books' strengths lie in its descriptions of setting, of time and place, rather than in its plot or characters. There are also some great, profound themes explored throughout the novel related to mortality, insanity, and poverty.
--I've been looking for a long time for a book that is written in the form of poetry, but tells a story with a plot like a novel does. This book really fit that description.
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