Sals Enlightenment in Mexico in Jack Kerouacs, On the Road Essays

In A Mexico Fellaheen from Lonesome Traveler, Jack Kerouac describes crossing the border between America and Mexico: "It's a great feeling of entering the Pure Land, especially because it's so close to dry faced Arizona and Texas and all over the Southwest B but you can find it, this feeling, this fellaheen feeling about life, that timeless gayety of people not involved in great cultural and civilization issues" (22). Mexico is at once "close to" America and yet distinct from it, a "Pure Land" removed from the fallout of Spengler's crumbling Western civilization. By acknowledging its primitive innocence, Kerouac calls attention to the difference between the ideal of freedom and pastoral harmony represented by Mexico and the reality of contemporary America. But more significantly, Kerouac describes later in the article the inherent contradictions of Mexico: in his experience with easily-accessible drugs, corrupt police, and fumbling novice bull-fighting, he also finds a profoundly rel igious people, and he is able to accept them without judgement as a complex mix of good and bad. As he says in that article, "I saw how everybody dies and nobody's going to care, I felt how awful it is to live just so you can die like a bull trapped in a screaming human ring" (33), but he ends with the understanding that "the world is permeated with roses of happiness all the time, but none of us know it. The happiness consists in realizing that it is all a great strange dream" (36). This vision of Mexico as a "Pure Land" with innate contradictions and complexity also appears in Kerouac's On the Road. In the final sections, Sal and Dean travel to Mexico City, but while Dean goes for kicks and to obtain a quick divorce, Sal goes for a different reas... ...na Baym. New York: Norton, 1998. 1072-1101 & 1126-43. Hunt, Tim. Kerouac's Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1981. Kerouac, Jack. "Mexico Fellaheen" from Lonesome Traveler. 1960. New York: Grove, 1988. ---. On the Road. 1957. New York: Penguin, 1991. ---. Visions of Cody. 1960. New York: Penguin, 1993. Lardas, John. The Bop Apocalypse: The Religious Visions of Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs. Urbana: U of Illinois Press, 2001. Niebuhr, Rienhold. The Irony of American History. New York: Scribner's, 1952. Schaub, Thomas Hill. American Fiction in the Cold War. Madison: U of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Tytell, John. "The Beat Generation and the Continuing American Revolution." in Ed. Holly George-Warren. The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats: The Beat Generation and American Culture. New York: Hyperion, 1999. 55-67.