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it stands.” Right from the opening line of the scroll Kerouac foregrounds this sense of abandonment and loss, and also the fatherlessness he shared with Cassady, whose own father was an estranged derelict: “I first met Neal not long after my father died…I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about except that it really had something to do with my father’s death and my awful feeling that everything was dead.” Cassady became a surrogate brother and father, a teacher and guide in Kerouac’s search to reconnect with those he had lost—brother, father, wife, household—a way of staving off the ephemerality that brought about this sense of abandonment and ultimate elusiveness, and a way of transcending the guilt and burden of existing in their wake. “Life is not enough,” Kerouac wrote in an August 1949 journal entry. What Kerouac sought was characterized by a tension between a subjective truth he found in origins—both within and without sociocultural institutions and temporal boundaries—and a sense of an objective reality which always kept such “authentic” truths at a distance, always absent, and, in that absence, romanticized and mythologized.

As both the scroll and the published version of On the Road attest, Cassady’s absence becomes a presence through legend. This resonates with the sense of the authentic, which is established in absence, recognized more according to what it is not rather than what it is. Kerouac’s close friend Hal Chase, who, like Cassady, was also originally from Denver, had shared with Kerouac the letters Cassady had sent him, telling Kerouac all he knew of the nebulous, fast-talking, car-jacking, streetwise womanizer, newly married and fresh out of the reformatory. Cassady was thus immediately established in Kerouac’s mind as the consummate “outsider,” an embodiment of uncompromising individuality, someone who appealed to Kerouac’s own sense of sociocultural displacement. “Shit on the Russians, shit on the Americans, shit on them all. I’m going to live life my own ‘lazy-no-good’ way, that’s what I’m going to do,” Kerouac wrote in a journal entry of August 23, 1948, and Cassady would become a vehicle through which Kerouac could attempt to lead such an existence. In the same journal entry he first explained that his new novel, On the Road, would be about “two guys” who journey “in search of something they don’t really find,” the central thematic and structural motif that would remain constant throughout the novel’s development, and one which would also come to characterize the relationship between Kerouac and Cassady, especially its depiction in Kerouac’s prose.

Kerouac’s composition of the scroll manuscript in April 1951 was coterminous with numerous works in existentialist literature. In The Rebel (1951), a book in which he argues that perpetual opposition is what brings about a reaffirmation of life in the midst of mass conformity, Albert Camus writes, “Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.” Camus is best known for his novel The Outsider (1942). In this novel and in similar fiction the central focus for what is most often an “antihero” is the search for such an essence of being, for the authentic. In Cassady, Kerouac saw the potential for attaining such authenticity, an existence that was totally subjective and impulsive, outside the boundaries of the conservative social institutions and cultural norms—dominant at the time—above all, an existence that transcended the constrictions of objective immutable Time and its regimentation of experience and expression. “I want uninterrupted rapture,” Kerouac writes in one of his On the Road workbooks, “Why should I compromise with anything else, or with the ‘Bourgeois’ calm of the backyard lawn.” This fervent desire, however, provides the counterpoint to the calm he simultaneously sought in his personal relationships and in a more centered domestic existence as a household patriarch, an ideal picture splintered by that ephemerality he so wished to transcend.

In Kerouac’s work,