James Baquet

    Going back to “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” written over 4,000 years ago, and continuing through Homer’s “Odyssey,” Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” and many, many others, authors have used a symbolic journey as a metaphor for a character’s growth and personal development.

    Back in 1957, an unlikely little volume joined this august company. “Unlikely,” because Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” makes no pretensions to be great literature, and yet somehow captured the zeitgeist of a generation of youth. The back cover of my circa 1960s copy even makes the connection to previous journeys explicit: It calls Kerouac the “Hippie Homer of the turned-on generation” who “shocked the country from coast to coast with this wild odyssey of two dropouts who swing across America wrecking and rioting.”

    But that’s marketing hype. The book does not vaunt itself so. It is humbler, more personal, though some passages give a glimmer of the grand design lying below the unassuming surface:

    “We bounced the car up on the Algiers ferry and found ourselves crossing the Mississippi River by boat. ‘Now we must all get out and dig the river and the people and smell the world,’ said Dean, bustling with his sunglasses and cigarettes and leaping out of the car like a jack-in-the-box. We followed. On rails we leaned and looked at the great brown father of waters rolling down from mid-America like the torrent of broken souls — bearing Montana logs and Dakota muds and Iowa vales and things that had drowned in Three Forks, where the secret began in ice.”

    This combination of “beat” (a term coined to describe members of the disillusioned generation who challenged the status quo in the 1950s, becoming the “Hippies” of the ’60s) and “picaresque” (a series of episodes in the life of a “roguish hero”) captured the imagination of the young; the older generation was not so enthusiastic.

    Time magazine called a “barbaric yawp of a book” in their review (a reference to Walt Whitman). Nearly 50 years later, the magazine named it one of the “100 best English-language novels.”

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. exaggerated publicity

    2. hint, dimly perceivable light

    3. claiming of more credit than one deserves

    4. the spirit of an age

    5. uncivilized, wild

    6. clearly stated

    7. honored

    8. boast (about)

    9. around, about

    10. having lost one’s idealism, disenchanted