zed by people but never articulates any reason for his fleeting interest, Sal/Jack seems to have picked up the attitude and put it on paper. Ginsberg, on the other hand goes very deep into the lives that surrounded him. Without the specifics of character creation Ginsberg writes about states and feelings that are created, in a literary sense, by the surroundings he describes. The untouched observer that is Kerouac and the deeply-involved observer-who-is-observed that is Ginsberg may be, in part, the result of their choice of literary form. A novelist is usually engaged in describing people while poets are freer to distill their feelings and reactions and put them down in relative purity without tangling them up with circumstantial details.
But the basis of the difference is that in going in search of the material he used to create his map of the usually hidden (or at least ignored) under-surface of American life (the hobos, migrant workers, the insane, drunk, and drugged) Kerouac has stood and pointed. In describing the madness of a long New Year's weekend of parties he notes at the height of one brawling celebration "There was even a Chinese girl there." (126). He is amazed at what he finds when he follows Dean and others on their inexplicable compulsiv
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