You Just Go

Abstract

Norman Mailer’s praise of Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, is a good place for a comparison of the two writers. Mailer not only met Kerouac but liked him: “His literary energy is enormous, and he had enough of a wild eye to go along with his instincts, and so become the first figure of a new generation.” Mailer is exactly right about Kerouac and “Ecstatic flux” perfectly identifies the mad bard’s subject and style. Yet as with the existential quests of American heroes like Huck and Nick Adams, Frederic Henry and Nick Carraway, Kerouac’s Sal Paradise of On the Road (1957) and Stephen Rojack of Mailer’s An American Dream (1965) take to the road in rebellion against what Sal calls the dream’s “screwed up” betrayals. Mailer and Kerouac distinguish themselves less in what they rebel against than in the manner of their rebellion. Mailer is analytical, with a powerful will to change, offering vigorous critiques of society’s misdeeds. Kerouac professed sympathy for all of creation. For three weeks in the relative stillness and peace of Big Sur’s woods, free of “booze, drunks, binges, bouts with beatniks and drunks and junkies,” he marvels at “a whole mess of little joys.” In the morning he makes “an excellent pan of muffins and tell myself ‘Blessed is the man can make his own bread.’” At noon he sits with books and coffee observing the “orange and black Princeton colors on the wings of a butterfly.” Yet Kerouac can no longer reconcile life’s bedeviling opposites as necessary parts of the whole—beauty with ugliness, bliss with horror, or justice with injustice.