Kerouac's is a reaction to the mass pleasure-seeking culture of popular times, the happy hamburger, the pleasure of the automobile, the safe politics of his times, that simple sweet candy of the American Dream.  He had to know it from within to recognize it;  it's not unknown of him to write of sensual desire and drunken attempts to find It in the blowings of a jazz man on a wild Saturday night.  He did his share, but he also sensed himself as fated to see through it all.

Kerouac sought to produce a product that compensated the faults of sensuality with wisdom, somewhat like the newspaper, a realistic look at life, helpful and informative, real, a full story.  He suffered alongside Cassidy the great empty chase not for all the apparent thrills but to tell--quite bravely--a chastened and sobering story.  In his travels he found Buddhism, fated for it and its understanding of the root of suffering.  But as if stuck in telling the same story, it seems he was unable to save himself, as if there were no place for him to find shelter in his own times.  He was left with too many challenges to find the scholarly peace he needed to continue his development, as it would have required of him the abandonment of the sensual pleasures the market demanded him to write about, and an escape from the light of fame as King of the Beats as well.  Even as the writing of books required of him to write about sensations and worldly observations (of the kind Buddhism tells us are best left ignored), it's interesting that what often emerges is the teacher.   The lengths he had to go to, to put tension in his story line, to not be 'pontificating,' it all didn't do him any good.  One wishes a position, a kind of teaching gig, could have been found for him.

To me there is always hope in Kerouac, though, a calm sensitivity to understand, on the verge of figuring it all out, but out of some strange thing related to compassion, falling back in.  And I think it takes a lot of guts for an American at that time to think about the Noble Truths, of how our quest for pleasure and happiness would leave us unsatisfied and even set up the harms that would come our way, as the politics of the time just wasn't ready for something so deep as to realize that level of interconnection.

Yes, it takes something fine for a person to realize what life has been subtly telling him all his life, and fine for him to then and go write about it, really for the sake of trying to save the rest.



I think there is some room for consideration of what you might call, A Buddhist Novel.  Maybe such a think has been in the works for a while, with Kafka, or Faulkner maybe.  A novelistic work which doesn't have to burdened by that artificial placement of concrete thought and sensual outcome, all that stuff regarded as necessary to create the tension that makes a work 'readable.'  As opposed to 'plotless.'  So, what you would have is something like Zen, like Kurosawa, a work showing the texture of life, like the grain in wood or in muscle, with no outside structure or desire for resolution imposed upon it, as it is truthfully represented, life as is, from which we can then draw a meaning from.  No winners, no losers, no 'man versus nature or himself or other,' just being.  Serving to reinforce the understanding of the connectedness of life, of the illusory quality of a concrete Ego/self.  Like the fine moments in Chekhov, the ending of "The Lady with the Pet Dog."