Overall it is still heading in the right direction but, for other considerations, taking far longer than necessary to get there. Like a car being driven on a dark highway, feeling for the road, it tends to swerve onto the shoulder before overcorrecting and swerving onto the other shoulder. True stream-of-consciousness is wayward and distracted. The style is a form of stream-of-consciousness but there are some differences. Within the first few pages the reason for this disdain becomes obvious it is the prose. For a novel hailed as a hugely influential modern classic, it is strange then that so many readers confess that they cannot stand this book, many saying they could not finish it and some that they could barely even start it. The novel catapulted the career of Kerouac who became a Cobain-like figure of the time the media had less interest in his writing or his books than in his potential as a spokesman for a generation, which he never aspired or claimed to be. On the Road is a novel often cited as defining a generation, changing lives and influencing many other searchers and writers. They share stories with fellow travellers and journeymen, drink heavily each night, thrill to the sounds of jazz and beg, borrow and steal to keep the journey going.

In On the Road, we follow Sal and Dean as they cross the country over a few summers in the late 40’s hitchhiking, riding the rails, trashing rental cars or even their own.

With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road. So begins Jack Kerouac’s On the Road with its immortal first paragraph line: He must hit the road and seek out Moriarty, to discover a real America, to search out pure joy and pleasure, perhaps even to find meaning for his life. Sal has been reading the epic, wild, ranting letters of one Dean Moriarty and within them sees a kindred spirit, another searcher. Somewhere out there is the answer to his life, a pearl of wisdom and enlightenment. As the weather turns warmer and a summer breeze floats into Jersey and New York his mind turns eastward towards the wide free spaces of America. Sal Paradise divorced, barely employed, sometime student, attempted writer lives in his aunt’s apartment in 1947 New Jersey feeling somewhat lost and uncertain. With its difficult prose, unconventional plot, diluted themes, unlikeable characters and with many successful iterations of its themes made since is there much reason left for the modern reader to read On the Road? Yet it is common to hear readers say they could not stand reading it. It has been described as innovative in its style, shocking in its frank depictions of sex and drugs, but romantic and spiritual in its character’s naïve quest for freedom and meaning.

Its influence has been widespread, has crossed generations and saw its author hailed as the voice of a generation. When Jack Kerouac’s On the Road was first published in 1957 it was soon recognised as a modern classic.

On the road jack k