/lit/ - Literature

I just finished it today and while the prose is hardly Nabokov, the story, while still interesting, is pretty straightforward and Kerouac's philosophising is just a bit meh, I still thought it was a quality read and enjoyed it all the way through. So why does everyone seem to hate it?

Love this book so far. Each page is has so much content in it. So easy to get lost in this book

does this get more interesting in later chapters? so far i'm like 40 pages in and he's introduced about 3 million different characters and none of them are really that intriguing to me.

what would the the characters in this book get up to if they were zoomers

Post a work of fiction you feel is grossly misinterpreted. I'll start.

Although Dean is Sal's muse, his inspiration and source of optimistic, youthful exuberance, the work itself is profoundly pessimistic in the sense that the life and philosophy embodied by Dean is an illusory adolescent fantasy. Remi is the logical conclusion to Dean's carefree attitude, a broken, bitter man robbed of his athleticism, strength, and ambition by the leisurely habits he picked up in his days of self-exploration. Rather than endorsing Dean and his optimism and lust for life, the novel instead presents him as a fairytale to be sampled by Sal but never fully embraced.

>I wished I were a Denver Mexican, or even a poor overworked Jap, anything but what I was so drearily, a “white man” disillusioned. All my life I'd had white ambitions; that was why I'd abandoned a good woman like Terry in the San Joaquin Valley I passed the dark porches of Mexican and Negro homes; soft voices were there, occasionally the dusky knee of some mysterious sensual gal; and dark faces of the men behind rose arbors. Little children sat like sages in ancient rocking chairs. A gang of colored women came by, and one of the young ones detached herself from motherlike elders and came to me fast -- “Hello Joe!” -- and suddenly saw it wasn't Joe, and ran back, blushing. I wished I were Joe. I was only myself, Sal Paradise, sad, strolling in this violet dark, this unbearably sweet night, wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic Negroes of America.

This is the finest piece of beat literature, and a decent travel book in it's own way.

Capote's criticism that it's not writing it's typing is a good witticism but truly means nothing. The opening line smack of that American attitude and disposition.

However, I do not consider it to be a piece hagiography. I'm not even sure I consider it to be among the major novels of the century.

Anyway, On the Road General

for some reason this book is both easy to read but is taking me ages to read it, I just can't motivate myself

What does /lit/ think about Jack Kerouac, On the Road, and Beat Generation writers/poets in general?