Musical aspects of Jack Kerouacs novel On the Road

One of the key markers of the so-called American beat generation culture was music, namely jazz and its avant-gardevariation bebop which developed in the 1940s as a reaction to the popular and commercially-successful swing music. Jack Kerouac,considered as the most prominent author of the beat generation, being a big admirer of jazz music, though later referenced as a totalexoteric to the world of professional jazz, utilized a modernist multicultural and syncretic approach when writing his most known novelOn the Road. Bebop music and musicians are widely referenced in the novel, the key narrative points of the novel tend to be linked withdifferent periods of bop development. Music as a sounding scheme in general is present on all levels of the novel - the narrative is consciouslyset to resemble jazz-poetry, sentences in the novel are set as what Kerouac called breaths in his manifesto on spontaneousprose or individual partitioned oral components separated by a unique kind of punctuation, the verbal structure of the novel is stylized asbob-prosody. In musical terms the plot structure of the novel appears syncopated, as the author describes his travels across the US andinterjects vast dialogues with his companions with visions and set pieces on the tragic meaning of life and existence. The popular historyof the creation of what the author and his critics called a spontaneous novel adds to the myth that On the Road is a work of completeimprovisation created frantically in less than three weeks. However, studies in the diaries and letters of Kerouac reveal that the authorextensively worked with drafts, revising his improvised lines copiously, creating what would later seem a perfectly spontaneousjazz-novel. Even the most known and quoted excerpts from the novel, which seem to be stream-of-consciousness-like examples of theauthors spontaneous style turn out to be parts of the authors personal correspondence and earlier drafts. The metaphorical comparisonof the author to a jazz musician, who adds his vast knowledge and skill to the improvisational approach and multicultural moderniststylistics drawn by one of the leading researchers in beat-culture, John Leland, is studied in the article. The true competence of the authorwho as per diaries and letters appeared to have very limited knowledge of how music is played is researched. At the end, authorsexperiments with actual melodeclamation and the vast legacy of On the Road in music culture in forms of dedications and plots for musicalpieces of different styles is shown.

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