, and basically existing on the fringes of middle-class society. In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac established his Buddhist-like leanings, a move which created a pop Buddhism across the nation which Kerouac in actuality resented. Dead by the time he was 47 from complications from alcoholism, Kerouac began to distance himself from his Beat friends by the end of his life, “Kerouac could not understand how Ginsberg could flash the peace sign and pronounce the imminent ‘fall of America’ while ignoring mass murders by China’s Mao Zedong…'Genet and Burroughs do not offend half as much, because they are metaphysically hopeless, but Ginsberg and Corso are ignorant enough to be metaphysically healthy and want to use art as a racket’” (Brinkley 51).
On The Road not only characterized the values of the Beat generation, but it also was a first-hand account of many of the adventures and antics of the Beat writers. In the work, Kerouac’s affection for Neal Cassady, called Neal Pomeray in the novel, is evident and so are the often frantic and anti-social values of the characters who live a fairly hedonistic life on the fringes of society, “they told me Neal was a mad genius of jails and raw power, that he was a god among the girls with a big huge crown wellknown wherever he went because he liked to talk about it and made frequent and assertive use of it. Also the women talked about it and wrote letters mentioning it, and sometimes frantic; a reader of Shopenhaur [sic] in reform, a Nietazshean [sic] hero of the pure snowy wild West; a champion. In the door he stood with a perfect build…” (Charters 342).
The belief that America and its institutions had become a vast industrialized wasteland was another unifying theme of the Beat writers. We will see this expressed with angry, dramatic conviction in Ginsberg’s Howl, later to be discussed, but it is also evident in The Dharma Bums in many places. In one particular episode ...