

They are two men sharing travel experiences. So kudos to the reader.Sal's and Dean's friendship throughout the novel reflects the buddy themes found in much classic and pop culture. About the audio version: it's finisheable, so the reader isn't half bad, I could't ever have finished this if I was reading it on paper, it was so terrible. Having there been nothing redeeming about the prose itself, I just feel really sorry I ever picked up this book.

He's actually a drunk misogynist jerk, and his friends are all jerks, but this book is trying to convey how ~coo~l they all are. And the main character, the narrator, isn't funny, isn't smart, isn't compassionate or anything else I could have maybe me amused by. They mostly drive through all of America, so the narrator sort of just names all the places they pass by, them having done absolutely nothing exciting in any of those places. But the characters are all so painfully uninteresting I couldn't care less about any of them. From what I understand, this is a memoir/journal of a character who travels places and does things with certain people. Since I can't un-read it, I'll complain about it. I'm glad it was audiobook format, or I would not have managed it. This book already started pretty bad, so the only reason I finished it was because I could not believe it could continue being that bad and still have the reputation it has. This edition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the first publication of the novel in 1957 and will be a must-have for any literature lover. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon, and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On the Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.

Based on Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On the Road tells the story of two friends whose four cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac’s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be “beat” and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that “set them free”. Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On the Road.
