Kerouac's novel, 'On the Road,' one of the main landmarks of the 'Beat Generation', is built around the theme of 'travel', interpreted as an individual and an alternative solution, able to oppose the reality of the American post-war capitalist and conformist society. The protagonists, Sal and Dean, travel the United States, experiencing themselves and the world around looking for an authentic dimension of life. They get drunk, driving madly along the endless roads through the territory, so venting their greed for life, even if they do not come to forms of moral degradation. In the most various adventures, they keep a “primitive innocence”, and an instinctive opposition to all expressions of conformity, which confine the instinct and creativity.
Sal Paradise, born and raised in New York, meets Dean Moriarty, a young just released from the reformatory, who challenges the rules of bourgeois society, wandering aimlessly. The two young men together make a series of travels across the U.S., back and forth between New York and San Francisco, seeking new experiences, which are able to satiate their obvious need for affection. During their travels, Sal, in addition to understanding not to have a disposition able to lead a precarious existence, reflects about the difficulty of many poor and destitute men, forced to live on the border of the rich American society, developing towards them a strong feeling of compassion. At the same time, Sal continues to admire the Dean’s vagabond lifestyle, seen as a 'Master', although Dean, at some point, leave him sick in Mexico City, returning by oneself to the U.S.
One of the most Kerouac’s enlightening pages is the Part III of first chapter, where the protagonist, Sal Paradise, wanders aimlessly through the streets of Denver; the rejection of the values on which American society is based, turns to him in a desire to belong to any marginalized minority, although do not belong to the White majority in power. But even walking in neighbourhoods frequented mostly by African-Americans, Mexicans and Japanese, not placates his sense of rootlessness, that pushes him to leave again to San Francisco. Sal, therefore, arrived in Denver. After transported the fruit to market, he wanders, with sore muscles, in neighbourhoods where live people of color, 'wanting to be a Negro.' He watches a volleyball game played among some African-Americans, whites and Mexicans children , and envies their 'childish and human joy.'
He never practiced sport so easy and joyful, and his experiences at the University were always interpreted as 'great opportunities', in which athletes had always 'pulling faces'. Its privileged white man condition appears to him false, forced, unnatural, dominated by the competition, by search of success, by rigid bourgeois conventions, while the world of the marginalized (because of race or social conditions) seem very close to the an original innocence. The feeling of bewilderment and anguish led him thus to leave for San Francisco, travelling across the immense United States territory. At the boundary between Colorado and Utah, Sal sees 'God in heaven as a form of clouds.' But Sal is attracted, rather than by the landscape, by simple and degraded things, as 'some old wrecked cars”. At the end of the travel appears to him the 'fabulous San Francisco”, the legendary city on the Pacific Ocean, filled with promises of a new life, new opportunities and happiness.
Undoubtedly the chapter offers us images away from the stereotypes of the period about the 'American way of life'. The world that Sal Paradise encounters in his travels consists of ordinary people, poor, on the outskirts of wealth and well-being enhanced by official u.s. culture. His wanderings for USA in hitchhiking and his ' to live from hand to mouth', make clear the total rejection of common values of the bourgeois society of mass. For this reason, the novel can be read as a kind of “manifesto” of the 'Beat Generation'. Also Kerouac’s writing is extremely 'modern', thanks to the incredible narrative rhythm, obtained with a language that offers the 'spoken', breaking apart the typical syntax of the traditional narrative. As Kerouac explained in his essay 'Belief and Technique for Modern Prose', the ideal status of writing for him was the 'trance', a condition which allowed his thoughts turn into words, 'according to the flow of ideas that existed in the mind'. More simply, the critical has defined the style of Kerouac 'jazz'.
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