Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac

Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were friends whose experiences figure in each other's works. They both made their mutual friend Neal Cassady central to their most famous works -- Ginsberg's poem Howl and Kerouac's novel On the Road. The similarities between the two writers' concerns, interests, and language are also numerous. Both of them seem to be mapping the same territory with maps highlighted by bursts of the poetry and poetic prose that the two have in common: the saxophones and bop, the drugs and drinking, the sex and the travel, the nights, the madness, and the endless conversations. Despite all these similarities, however, they produced two very different works. Ultimately Ginsberg's work is about reaching inside himself. Self-knowledge, no matter how disturbing, sad, or horrifying, is what he is after. Kerouac and his character Sal remain unknown. The novel never seems like a means of getting outside himself and taking an objective look nor a way of getting inside himself. His terrific pace and rushing energy are like a flight away from himself. On the Road reads like the account of a man who believes that as long as he keeps pointing and saying "Look over there, at him," he will manage to escape notice. With Kerouac the piling up of incidents is fascinating but it eventually wears on the reader just as it wore on Sal/Jack. "All that again?" poor, sick Sal eventually asks Dean Moriarty (302). With Ginsberg the horror builds and its effect is cumulative.

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adults and small children probably struck Terry's family as a fairly horrible afternoon. If they were drinking there was a touch of frustration and despair to which Sal is impervious or indifferent. When Ricky says "Today we drink, tomorrow we work" Sal misses the implied "because" that joins the two halves of the remark (91). To him they are drinking because they are wild -- like him. As Sal says, "Well there we were and another wild day began" (91). In the middle of the hot, drunken driving day they stop and coax a reluctant man to sell them a watermelon. "We got the watermelon; we ate it on the spot and threw the rinds on the old man's dirt sidewalk" (92). He sounds at times like a little boy telling his mother about the naughty things that these people did. There was no real reason to mention what was done with the rinds and if they were thrown in a country yard there was no reason not to say "yard" or "road" but if it was a "sidewalk" the naughtiness was even worse. At moments such as this the reader gets the impression that Kerouac is remembering some event and that the initial small shock at the rudeness of this behavior was Kerouac's. When Sal is floating in a marijuana haze and notes about a Mexican prostitute

Category: Literature - A