Thoughts on On the Road.

To be honest, I didn't love On the Road- the book and the movie. It's a remarkably original, interesting book, and the movie was well done. However, the plot never gripped me, I saw it more as Kerouac detailing how he and his friends severely messed up their lives, with drugs, sex, and instability. The characters were so careless and messy with their personal lives, and cavalier about their futures. Some would argue that this is exactly what makes the novel compelling- the blatant disregard from the norm, the organic quality of their travels, and I don't disagree. The New York Times said the novel was "the most beautifully executed, the clearest and the most important utterance yet made by the generation Kerouac himself named years ago as 'beat,' and whose principal avatar he is." Many people say of the beat generation that it was a group of people trying to find meaning in their personal lives and in the world. I think Dean and Sal truly believed in their own ability to thrive by defying the norms, but as the years went on they realized that they were unable to live forever as the young, carefree men they had once been. 

There are so many parallels between the Bloomsbury group and Dean, Sal, and their friends. Both groups had very open relationships with one another, many were homosexual and explorative in their relationships. Additionally, they believed most of all in the power of friendship, and all were extremely unique individuals. They didn't believe in many of the norms of society and instead shunned the preconceived notions made available by the American and British public in order to explore their own ideas further. Sal writes of his new companions "and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn..." I believe this quote could just as easily be applied to Virginia Woolf (or any of the Bloomsbury members) and her desire to meet those people who deviated from society, those who wrote and painted and spent their time doing exactly as they pleased. 

Sal also muses "The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death." This reminds me of Virginia because of her complex life history with death and her multiple suicide attempts, and finally her unfortunate suicide on the River Ouse. She yearns for more than her life provides her, and her mental illness exacerbates her struggles to find peace and happiness in her life. Most notably at the end of her life she feels engulfed and absorbed entirely by the War going on around her and the implications a Nazi invasion will have on her family. I pity her because she already was struggling with mental illness, but in addition to wholeheartedly believe she and her husband would be killed by German invaders must have been terrifying. 

The experience of watching On the Road in such a historically significant cinema was extremely memorable, and I thought the parallels between On the Road and the Bloomsbury Group helped me to understand both a bit better, by seeing these parallels on the big screen.