Wanderlust. It affects the best of us sooner or later. We get tired of the same old routine, the same old house, the same old job, the same daily repetitions. We get tired of the cycle and want direction: a long, straight road that you can drive down with utter abandon until the ends of the earth. This desire for escape is universal. Just as we all want to see new lands, meet new people, sometimes all we want is a good read in a book to imagine a side of life we’ve never seen. Traveling the road of a text through a book that asks, “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” (22)

Any reader who picks up On the Road will get thrust into the world of the hobos, hipsters, fairies, hitchhikers, and okies that make up the generation of beat men and women who rebel against the sedentary life of late 1940s America. No, this is not a fantasy novel, despite the colourful names of some of the types Sal and Dean meet on the road. It is a novel about fantasy and fulfillment, about imagining what might await you on the open highway. It’s a celebration of the present moment and an exploration of a country whose infrastructure enables one to fly anywhere from coast to coast in a train, bus, van, sedan, convertible, or jalopy.  All avenues open, anything is possible.

Sal Paradise gets this itch to start moving after his divorce. A combination of the empty space he feels within himself and his new freedom as a bachelor leads him to follow Dean Moriarty, a man who digs every highway and every suffering, glorious person along the way. They chase girls, drink at bars, and break speed limits, taking in as much experience as they can. They travel in a matter of days to the Western lands that America’s settlers took months to reach by caravan, but their idea of the West is the same: it is paradise, it is freedom.

If the Beat Generation is a religion, then Dean Moriarty may be its God, and Jack Kerouac his prophet. Dean is omnipotent: he is a lawless, frantic container of sexual energy, who can convince a woman to sleep with him by uttering the location and time of their appointment. Dean is omnipresent: he can travel anywhere in America and has a knack of showing up at the perfect time. Dean is omniscient: he takes in everything he sees and knows the streets and roads better than anyone. He’s madly in love with the present moment, he knows time, and the world is not enough to contain him.

From San Fran to San Antonio, from New York to Nebraska, the duo crosses the States, searching like the questers of the Grail after what Dean calls It. They want to dig people who have It, the insight into life’s meaning, the drive that gives life its enjoyment and perfection. They search in hobo railway yards, Prairie cotton fields, mambo-playing Mexican whorehouses, abandoned California mining towns, and all over for this treasure. But like in all knightly romances, the meaning of their journey arises in the telling, and not so much in the result. Society continually weighs them down, threatening that one day, its demands will bring an end to their life on the road. But while in the presence of Dean’s seemingly infinite, mad energy, Sal has no room to doubt that he is in for the ride of his life.