Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

Hello and welcome to The Young Reader’s Review! 

You’re a teenager, you have that I-hate-the-world-around-me-Holden-Caulfied-is-God angst and you post passive aggressive memes on your Instagram with bitter, self-ironic comments. You try to be seen reading Sartre because even though you don’t understand a word he says since you’re pretty sure that he’s smarter than you are. You will eventually wander into a bookstore one day with thirty dollars in your pocket and The Smiths playing in your earbuds, see the name Kerouac that vaguely resonates in your mind and then impulsively purchase On the Road and proceed by going to buy a beanie at a thrift store. You will then go through a phase where all you want to do is drop out of high school and do a road trip in California, leading a life of debauchery and poetry. A couple of years pass by. Then, you somehow come across Big Sur, perhaps in a public library or at your aunt’s garage sale. Hazily remembering how you worshipped On the Road, you decide to give it a try. You begin to read it, only to realize that this one isn’t about going after girls, hopping trains, taking drugs or abrupt trips to deep Mexico. 

Big Sur, Jack Kerouac’s 1962 novel is, like all of his works, autobiographical. Employing the same free-form style as in On the Road, Kerouac (known in the story as his fictional alter-ego Jack Duluoz) recounts his retreat (on three separate trips) to a cabin owned by his friend and the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti in Bixby Canyon, California in the aftermath of On the Road’s success. Between 1958 and 1960, Kerouac published ten books. He was famous, had all of the money that he could have ever wished for, he was praised like a God by youngsters and his books would have been published by anyone. He had it all, he had achieved what any writer, including myself, strive to become. Yet, he absolutely hated it. Constantly approached by “beatniks” and slowly declining from alcoholism and constant anxiety, the writer sought respite in his withdrawal from society in Big Sur and with his relationship with Billie, his friend Cody Pomeray’s (actually Neal Cassady in real life) mistress. If you leave On the Road on a shelf for some years and let its pages yellow and accumulate dust, it is more or less the equivalent of Big Sur. In other words, it’s a wrinkled On the Road: you won’t find the ecstatic energy and rush of On the Road but you will still find the familiarity of the novel’s style. 

I qualified in the last paragraphed Lawrence Ferlinghetti as being a “Beat poet”, but what does that exactly mean? The Beat Generation (a name coined by Jack Kerouac in 1948 during a conversation with writer John Clellon Holmes) was a post-war American literary and social movement that began in the mid 1950s. The term “beat” was first used as a connotation to being “weary”, or “beaten down” but later evolved to derive from “beatific” or even the musical definition of the word. I like the ambiguity of the origin of the term since, for me, the Beat Generation is a sort of blissful drowsiness; these “bohemian hedonists” adopted a raw writing style that still detains a dreamy quality. The members involved in this movement sought spiritual illumination through, for example, Buddhism, psychedelic drugs, jazz or sex. The Beats also believed in, as Allen Ginsberg writes in his book The Best Minds of My Generation: A Literary History of the Beats, “general liberation”, whether that be sexual, gay, black or women’s liberation. The epitome of the Beat Generation novel would have to be On the Road. Big Sur is part of the Beat Generation in the sense that Jack Duluoz, or Jack Kerouac, completely abandons society and ignores its morals (which is also reflected in the spontaneity and singularity of his writing style). Yet I believe that Big Sur bespeaks a tired-out version of Beat Generation literature, where Kerouac strives to realistically show the reader what his life is actually like. In an eerie way, Big Sur coincides with the original meaning of the term “Beat”. 

If you’re an American teenager, your teachers have probably talked to you about a certain Henry David Thoreau, and maybe even more specifically about Walden. If you’re familiar with the latter, then Jack Duluoz’s retreat to Big Sur might remind you of transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau’s retreat to Walden Pond. I think that we can generally say that the Beat Generation inherited many traits from Transcendentalism (Emerson, father of the Transcendentalist movement, is mentioned numerous times in the novel) such as the importance of nature or the innate goodness of man. There are many moments in Big Sur where Kerouac sits in front of the ocean, alone, listening to the “words” the waves say to him (Kerouac even includes “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur”, a poem at the end of Big Sur, about what the sea inspired him). Many would think that this appreciation of nature could be comparable to a Romanticist vision of the world. In my opinion, it differs in the sense that nature is not idealized nor is man described as being a component of nature. I think that the wilderness in Big Sur is more of a soul-purging complement to Jack Duluoz. Kerouac even says that he does not find Big Sur to be beautiful but that he finds it to be more “fearful” than anything. 

But, “why should I read this?” you may ask. Well, if On the road makes you dream, Big Sur makes you feel. You should read Big Sur because it feels real: the prose isn’t florid, but it’s poetic in an almost haunting way, you can almost smell the beer leaking through its pages, you can feel the words tremble with anxiety as you read them. You understand Jack Kerouac, you understand what it’s like to look for joy and not be able to find it. Big Sur is visceral, raw. It’s the slap in the face that you needed, the “come on, grow up!”. That’s why you should read it. I promise you, reading Big Sur is a unique experience. 

That is it for today’s review! Don’t forget to follow me on Google + for constant updates for when I post and to check out my creative writing blog). If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below! See you next time for another review! (ﾉ≧ڡ≦)