SOURCE: “The Sound of Despair: A Perfected Nonlinearity,” in The Spontaneous Poetics of Jack Kerouac: A Study of the Fiction, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987, pp. 89-118.

In the following essay, Weinreich examines Desolation Angels as the culmination of Kerouac's religious and philosophical thinking just before the publication of On the Road.

Do you hear that? The sound of it alone is wonderful, no? What can you give me in English to match that for sheer beauty of resonance?

—Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi

Kerouac attempted to resolve the aesthetic problems of Visions of Cody in his next period of writing, from 1953 with the writing of The Subterraneans on through the sixties, as his life and thinking became more religious and philosophical. The culmination of the experiments that comprise Visions of Cody is found in Desolation Angels, [hereafter abbreviated as DA] a novel concerned with the period of...