At the end of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, narrator Sal Paradise finds himself back where his cross-country journey began a year earlier--in New York City. What specific features of Kerouac's prose contribute to its colloquial flavor--the sense that Sal is talking to us?
from On the Road*
by Jack Kerouac
Suddenly I found myself on Times Square. I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent road-eyes the absolute madness and fantastic hoorair of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City. The high towers of the land--the other end of the land, the place where Paper America is born. I stood in a subway doorway, trying to get enough nerve to pick up a beautiful long butt, and every time I stooped great crowds rushed by and obliterated it from my sight, and finally it was crushed. I had no money to go home in a bus. Paterson is quite a few miles from Times Square. Can you picture me walking those last miles though the Lincoln Tunnel or over the Washington Bridge and into New Jersey? It was dusk. Where was Hassel? I dug the square for Hassel; he wasn’t there, he was in Riker’s Island, behind bars. Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life? I had my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too. I had to panhandle two bits for the bus. I finally hit a Greek minister who was standing around the corner. He gave me a quarter with a nervous look away. I rushed immediately to the bus.
Selected Works by Jack Kerouac
- On the Road, novel (1957)
- The Subterraneans, novel (1958)
- The Dharma Bums, novel (1958)
- Maggie Cassidy, novel (1959)
- Lonesome Traveler, nonfiction (1998)
* Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) was republished by Penguin in 1999.
