Self-discovery in Desolation Angels Essay -- Desolation Angels Essays

Self-disc all overy in Desolation Angels Stripped to its b best essentials, sea dog Kerouacs novel Desolation Angels reads as a drug-induced stupor of casual conjure (or fantasies thereof), mixed into a melting of jazz and poetry. The often-adolescent urges of Kerouacs character Jack Duluoz, however, argon mere episodes in the fast-paced, write-it-as-you-think-it, pre-literary notoriety phase in the life of a man who essentially founded the Beat generation. Though the overflowing stream of ken that comprises this book seems undoubtedly spontaneous, Desolation Angels actually examines, in a to the highest degree straightforward and clearly organized manner, the state of human solitude. Zipping from a woods Service mountaintop outpost to San Francisco, from Tangiers to London, and slipping from loneliness to jazz clubs full of cats, from a morphine addicts room to the home of his knitting French Canadian mother, the angels of devastation take on varying shapes, ceaselessly trail ing Duluoz/Kerouac. The novel begins as Duluoz/Kerouac ascends Desolation Peak on Starvation Ridge in the higher(prenominal) Cascades for a seventy-day job as a lookout for woods fires. He initially anticipates with relish the idea of a seclusion that pull up stakes allow him to ponder the meaning of all this existence and suffering and breathing out to and fro in vain without the distractions of friends, drugs or alcohol Yet as the long time dissolve into each other endlessly, he begins to tire of the monotony of Desolation. The hard emptiness greeting him from his outlook reflects the vacuity of life as he sees it. Entitled Desolation in Solitude, this chapter records his mind patterns as he despairs over the Void, an uncertain entity that symbolizes an eternal, vast, indifferent force of ... ...r undying devotion to him, and this seems to partially formulate the source of his anger. He mourns the fact that a creature as wholesome and pure as she will inevitably grow old and conk without leaving a mark on anyone but himself and his sister. Yet in accepting her mortality, he, for the first time in the book, finds an extended sense of peace. passim all of his earlier road trips and travels, he searched for serenity, only to be followed by Desolation. Here, finally, taking a bus across the country with strong merely innocent Memere, does he leave them behind. In witnessing this change, the reader understands that constant feat cannot effect a sense of place, as Duluoz/Kerouac had thought throughout his pass(a) excursions. Only facing our relationships with those we truly love can answer our questions regarding who we are in this mixed-up world.