Kerouac On the Road: Pilgrimage and Prose

The Catholic Mysticism of Jack Kerouac, part 3

Part 1: On Kerouac’s Holy Road
Part 2: Visions of Gerard, Visions of Eden

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On the Road screamed onto the American literary scene in 1957 like a speeding hot rod. A novel in name but a true-life fever dream in spirit, Kerouac’s recounting of his adventures crossing the continent in the late ‘40s became a sensation and is now considered a foundational pillar of Beat literature. While the book can seem, at first glance, to be a paean to hedonism, behind the reckless wandering is a deeper truth: On the Road isn’t a book about debauchery; as Kerouac would later say, it is about “two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God.”

And what does it mean when Catholics roam a land in search of God?
It means they are on a pilgrimage.

Your Face, Lord, Do I Seek

Kerouc was born into a French-Canadian immigrant family and was both enraptured by America and keenly aware of his outsider status. As he wrote in a letter to a friend, “my subject as a writer is of course America… And simply I must know everything about it.”¹

For Kerouac, steeped as he was from childhood in the Catholic sacramental worldview, America was knit together with divine radiance. As he wrote in a journal in 1948, he crisscrossed the country in order to “see the world, which was the City of God.” This quest across America in On the Road mirrors one of the oldest Christian traditions: movement reflecting a deeper ache for communion. In this light, On the Road is a modern retelling of the age-old cry of the Psalmist: My heart says to you, “Your face, Lord, do I seek.”

A Christian pilgrimage is an embodied prayer; as a pilgrim moves through physical space what they are seeking is more than a specific place but a spiritual encounter that slakes the interior longing of the soul. On the Road revolves around Kerouac’s longing for theophany, the aching desire to find what he keeps calling IT - a mysterious, undefinable essence that seems to constantly shimmer just ahead of him, flickering through jazz riffs and at the edge of the highway at dusk. IT is one of the most enigmatic symbols in the Kerouac mythos, meaning many things at once, but ultimately, I believe, a signifier for mystical transcendence.

In Christian tradition, the fulfillment of our deepest longing for transcendence is theosis (or divinization), a lifelong process of spiritual growth and communion with God that culminates in the face-to-face vision of God in the life to come. Throughout Scripture, to behold the face of God is depicted as overwhelming, even perilous. The human soul, unprepared, cannot withstand the unmediated radiance of divine glory. And yet, throughout the Old and New Testaments is the promise of something deeper – a final unveiling when the human soul will be made ready: “Now we see through a glass, darkly,” writes Saint Paul, “but then face to face.”

Mystics and saints have written of visions, ecstasies, and states of interior communion in which the soul is drawn beyond reason into the deepest core reality. These moments are often fraught and overwhelming, they require the cultivation of a sound mind through prayer and surrender in order to bear the overwhelming, mind-bending reality of His presence.

In On the Road Kerouac is, perhaps unknowingly, attempting to do the same. He is stripping away comfort and breaking open his soul across a thousand miles of road – all to catch a glimpse of something he can’t yet name. Along the way he knows there will be “girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.”²

This mention of “the pearl,” this enigmatic Biblical image of the ultimate treasure - divine truth - comes from an imagination powerfully shaped by a Catholic tradition that saw the world as drenched in God’s presence. Kerouac’s idiosyncratic vision - messy, mystical, and incarnational - didn’t fit the world of mid-century America, and the result was a lifelong tension: the soul of a Catholic mystic wandering the highways of a disenchanted continent.

“The car was swaying as Dean and I both swayed to the rhythm and the IT of our final excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our soul all our lives.”

In Kerouac’s signature incandescent phrasing, he reveals the heart of the matter by saying these “riotous angelic particulars” had been there all along. The road didn’t take them to the place where these divine flickerings existed, the road merely freed them from the strictures of everyday living that can blinker us to the ecstasies inherent in reality. This echoes the understanding that while God is always present everywhere, the soul must be readied to perceive Him. IT, for Kerouac, is the beatific vision in fragments, fleeting glimpses of the divine scattered across America. Kerouac’s pilgrimage feels like an ancient urge filtered through the modern American vernacular, an attempt to grasp at that same beatific flash, to reach for the edge of I AM through the hustle and hunger of the road.

Go Thou Across the Ground

The spark that lit the fuse of On the Road came in the form of Neal Cassady, a fast-talking drifter with an almost inhuman intensity. Neal’s mother had died when he was just a boy and he was raised by a roving father. Arrested for stealing cars, he then spent some of his childhood in reform school. Kerouac, a shy, introspective, outsider by nature, was enthralled by Neal, who moved through the world with a bombastic brilliance.

The relationship between Cassady and Kerouac was a turbulent mix of brotherly devotion, intense friendship, and lust. Kerouac’s sexuality is often flattened by contemporary presumptions, but what emerges from his books, letters, and friendships is more conflicted and deeply human than a fixed label can capture. As Kerouac’s friend, former girlfriend, and biographer Joyce Johnson wrote, “it has always seemed a futile pursuit to try to affix labels of sexual identity to Jack. The more profound issue was that he did not know what to do with love – no matter who it came from. To be loved was to be entrapped… Yet there was love radiating from Jack all the time.”³

The letters Neal wrote to Kerouac - written in an orthogonal, hopscotching way, with strange, swirling prose - unlocked something for the writer. This would play a pivotal role in the emergence of Kerouac’s signature technique: spontaneous prose. This was an ecstatic mode of writing that defied grammar and convention in favor of raw, lyric perception. Writing in this way, Kerouac would access a trance-like state of observation and linguistic fluidity that allowed him to channel what often felt like mystical insights.

With its torrential energy, incantatory rhythm, and shivering sensory impressions bursting with emotion, the longer you read, the more the veil seems to lift: vagrants on street corners become prophets, jazz solos become sermons, and the open road becomes a holy pilgrimage. In this way, Kerouac’s prose becomes a form of pilgrimage and a form of prayer – ragged, rapturous, and radically open to grace. This is language that mirrors the interior state of a mystic in motion: ecstatic, urgent, and sacramentally alive.

“In short, spontaneous prose challenges an author to absorb the revelatory moment, the divine spark, writing freely and naturally and honestly and profusely, without literary affectation, and no only from the head, but from the heart and soul and through the body and blood, bones and bowels… At its best, and in terms of sheer writing, Kerouac’s spontaneous prose achieved a feral beauty, and a sense of fidelity, rhythm, and power that has been unparalleled in American literature.”⁴

There is a scene in Visions of Cody, a re-imagining of On the Road, in which Kerouac recounts a vision that can be seen as animating his entire project and forming the the heart of his spontaneous prose technique. Here he looks up at the clouds “huge and massed above the fiery golden desert of eveningfall” and sees an image of God with his finger pointed straight at him, “through halos and rolls and gold folds” and this image of God tells him “Go thou across the ground; go moan for man…”⁵

Kerouac was “primarily a religious writer,”⁶ above all “a ragged priest of the word,”⁷ and this is a flagrantly Biblical scene of prophetic vocation. On the Road can then be understood as the first fulfillment of that call: a sustained, ecstatic cry - ecstatic in the mystical sense as in standing outside the self to channel wisdom and spiritual insight on behalf of the larger community. And, for the rest of his brief, troubled life, Kerouac would heed this charge. He would go across the ground of modern America, moaning for man, speaking of God and hope and torment, like a mystic torn open by revelation, bearing witness through movement and memory.

Orphans of Modernity

Though the events of On the Road took place in the late 1940s, the novel wasn’t published until 1957 – just as the cultural seams of postwar America were beginning to strain. By the time the 1960s counterculture burst forth, Kerouac’s book was seen as catalytic, becoming something of a sacred text for the counterculture who saw it as a model for rejecting the supposedly stifling conformity of the American Dream.

But there’s a strange irony in this timing. The book had been written years before the revolution it was said to ignite, and its author was no disciple of the drug-fueled, anti-American hedonism that followed. In fact, he would eventually grow to denounce it, having become an “unhappy prisoner of his own myth.”⁸ And what many of the young idealists who adopted On the Road for a manual of rebellion missed was that the book was not really a straightforward rejection of meaning, but a desperate search for it.

The youth of the 1960s were the spiritual orphans of a desacralized West, a generation raised in the full flower of the materialist worldview taught to mock tradition, dismantle hierarchy, and dismiss the very concept of sacred truth. Stripped of a framework in which to situate their longing, they turned to indulgence, drugs, New Age ideas and imported spiritualities, grasping continually for transcendence in a culture that had taught them to deny God. What often followed was a sad trajectory of burnout and disillusionment.

A similar path can be seen in On the Road. For Kerouac, or rather for his fictionalized self, Sal Paradise, the road is at first a pathway to ecstasy, the highway a sort of sacrament. But as the journey wears on and on, he and his companions make an idol of the road, mistaking it for IT. On the Road is clearly not a morality tale; it’s full of sex, sin, and spiritual confusion. Eventually, the constant motion sours and takes on flashes of threatening darkness. Without a sturdy theological and moral foundation, everything becomes free fall.

The search for communion with God is a profound act that can destabilize the soul if undertaken without grounding. Mystics often live quiet lives, rooted in prayer and humility, so that when - or if - the flickering glimpses of God arrive they have the strength of mind to endure them. Kerouac, by contrast, chased revelation without an anchor, spinning ever deeper into chaos, and the road predictably began to unravel him. By the time On the Road was published the unraveling was well underway; Kerouac struggled with alcoholism and died at 47.

But the word that came to define the literary movement he helped spark – Beat – was never about exhaustion or crude rebellion. “Kerouac was trying to make everything holy,” and he would later insist “Beat” meant beatific. As he said, “because I am Beat, I believe in Beatitude and that God so loved the world He gave His only begotten son to it.”

Kerouac was born into a time and a world that didn’t understand him, that held him up as the hero of a counterculture movement he opposed. But as a “writer-shaman, Kerouac liberated language for the purpose of ecstatic expression,”⁹ in effect saving our cultural imagination from “being overwhelmed by the consensus reality.”¹⁰ Kerouac’s true vocation was to sing the mystical beauties of life itself in rapturous prose, to see angels flickering in neon, to weep for mankind in boxcars and tenements, to seek out the sacred that is always there shivering just beneath the veneer of the secular. That was, in the end, Kerouac’s real journey, that was his holy road.

1. The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac, Joyce Johnson, 2012, pg. 237

2. On the Road, Jack Kerouac, 1957, pg. 11

3. The Voice, 186

4. Kerouac, the Word and the Way, Ben Giamo, 2000, pg. 46

5. Visions of Cody, Jack Kerouac, 1972, pg. 295

6. Kerouac, the Word and the Way pg. XVI

7. ibid, XIV

8. The Voice is All, 107

9. Kerouac in Ecstasy, Thomas R. Bierowsky, 2011, pg. 180

10. ibid, 18