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By Root 1791 0

formation of an advanced capitalist society were perceived and experienced as threats from those outside American borders and from those who had been excluded within those borders, women and blacks and homosexuals.” While Kerouac’s concern with race is apparent in both the scroll of On the Road and the published version, all blatant references to sexuality—especially homosexuality—were edited out of the 1957 edition. Sex acts are more explicit and egalitarian in the scroll. According to Ginsberg, LuAnne is “all for” divorcing Neal so that he can marry Carolyn but “says she loves his big cock—so does Carolyn—so do I.” This version explores women’s sexuality and freedom in an era when, as Joyce Johnson writes in her Beat memoir Minor Characters, people frowned at a girl from a “nice family” who left her parents’ house, knowing “what she’d be up to in that room of her own.” Women did not have the same degree of mobility as men and the costs of rebellion were much greater. Johnson writes, “Once we had found our male counterparts, we had too much blind faith to challenge the old male/female rules,” yet “we knew we had done something brave, practically historic. We were the ones who dared to leave home.”

Although the road that Kerouac depicted was only fully open to those who had the luxury of traveling it without major consequences, its liberating possibilities extended to whoever could find a way to interpret them. Marylou, Dean’s lover, is on the road for a good part of the novel and seems an even stronger presence in the scroll. She never gets much of a voice in either version, but she is the witness, using the men as much as they use her, siphoning their energy and road wisdom without accountability. This, too, is a form of freedom. Although the book is about the search for the lost father, it is also about the potential for women to wrest control in the end by gaining access to experience ordinarily denied them and revising it to suit their own formulations of the road narrative. Women are catalysts for broader change as well. In the scroll, Jack remembers his mother telling him of the need for men to expiate their offenses, which instigates a train of thought ultimately left out of the exchange between Sal and his aunt in the published version: “All over the world, in the jungles of Mexico, in backstreets of Shanghai, in New York cocktail bars, husbands are getting drunk while the women stay home with the babies of the everdarkening future. If these men stop the machine and come home—and get on their knees—and ask for forgiveness—and the women bless them—peace will suddenly descend on the earth with a great silence like the inherent silence of the Apocalypse.” In this passage, Kerouac anchors the relationship between America and the rest of the world on a collective redressing of wrongs, represented here through a critique of gender roles. He suggests that borders, both within and between nations, have the potential to erode if we begin to untangle our human histories of oppression, negligence, and shame through a prism of love and empathy.

On the Road asks us to consider, if not fully share, perspectives beyond those of white men, but it also endorses the creation of new versions of outsiderness. Kerouac’s representation of America was a response to the disingenuousness of a “cold” war, more ominous in its implicit disavowal of the actual costs of conflict than its explicit counterpart, the “hot” war. In a parallel analogy, two years after the publication of On the Road, Kerouac writes that there are two styles of “hipsterism”: the cool, represented by the “bearded laconic sage,” a person “whose speech is low and unfriendly, whose girls say nothing and wear black,” and the hot, who is “the crazy talkative shining eyed (often innocent and openhearted) nut who runs from bar to bar, pad to pad looking for everybody, shouting, restless, lushy, trying to ‘make it’ with the subterranean beatniks who ignore him.” Most of the artists of the Beat Generation, he explains, “belong to the hot school, naturally since that hard gemlike