ABSTRACT
Previously, Kerouac had encouraged Cassady, Burroughs, and Holmes to write the story of their own lives, and he had even started his second wife Joan on a project to describe her life "in utter detail from beginning to end." Joan had asked him, "What did you and Neal really do?" on the cross-country trips Jack and Neal had taken together before their marriage. Kerouac decided to write his "road book" as if telling her the story of his adventures with Cassady, choosing first-person narration like Burrough's laconic autobiography but imitating Cassady's confessional style to dramatize the emotional effect his road experiences had had on him. Kerouac might have been critical of the romantic fiction of "Scott Fitz," but he had made a study of The Great Gatsby (1925) for a literature course at the New School and had learned the value of using a sympathetic narrator (himself as the character he called "Sal Paradise") to tell the story of an American hero (Neal Cassady as Dean Moriarty) who flees his past to embrace what he imagines as the freedom of his future. Kerouac's fictional portrait of Neal Cassady as a "great amorous soul" is the central achievement of On the Road, but the persona Kerouac created for himself as the innocent "Sal Paradise" who "shambled after" Dean is an equally skillful creation. Sal is a morally consistent presence in the book, a solid backdrop for the reader's encounter with the dazzlingly unpredictable whirlwind called Dean Moriarty.
