SOURCE: “The Road as Transition,” in The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987, pp. 34-56.

In the following essay, Weinreich discusses On the Road as a picaresque novel.

The Open Road. The great home of the soul is the Open Road. Not heaven, not paradise. Not ‘above.’ Not even ‘within.’ The soul is neither ‘above’ nor ‘within.’ It is a wayfarer down the Open Road.

—D. H. Lawrence, “Whitman”

If The Town and the City establishes the essential proposition of the Duluoz legend—that is, the loss of spiritual values prophesying the decline of America and its soul—then On the Road [hereafter abbreviated as OR] extends this idea in a picaresque mode. The soul journeys along the open highway of America, in search of permanence, of values that will endure and not collapse. Indeed, as the design of the...