On the road towards absurdism

The day after tomorrow is meaningless when you are high enough to hear colours and taste shapes in a stranger’s car on a desolate country road to wherever you think you’ll find God. The Second World War had just ended; the average man’s ideal tomorrow was the “suburban house, one wife and two kids” American Dream. For Sal Paradise, tomorrow is a maybe. Amidst Sal’s countercultural defiance of the mainstream pursuit, On the Road became an accidental ode to absurdism.

The American late 1940s came with promises of economic prosperity and whatever it took to return to some sort of “normalcy.” But property rights, patriotism, or traditional family values did not necessarily unfold this said “maybe” tomorrow. Sal Paradise, the protagonist, is not satisfied with the newest serial fridge, a paid-off mortgage, or getting on with his neighbour. His purpose was something elusive down the road, something he didn’t know how or where to look for: a new lover, another high, the next town over? Sex, drugs, and jazz carried Sal, or better said, Jack Kerouac, all across the United States and Mexico, eventually accumulating the plot of his semi-biographical novel (or rather confession, as I like to say), On the Road (Watson 1997, p. 134). I call it more of a confession than a novel, not because it fits the nonconformist beat sentiment, but because it exposes the contradiction of their rebellion. For a generation that prided itself on rejecting the structure and purpose of the “established” society, their restless movement seemed to be just that: movement for nonconformity’s sake. Like Burroughs summed up, in America, it’s either deviance or utter boredom (Burroughs 1953, p. 185). A shitty job in New York, a hitchhike to San Francisco. Drugs in New Orleans, jazz in Denver, prostitutes in Laredo. And then Sal is back in New York. Then he leaves once more. And comes back again. No matter how far the car took him, the road didn’t seem to lead to enlightenment either.

This perpetual search for the meaning of life, the constant human drive to find purpose and significance, is a tale as old as time. Does this mean that we are doomed to keep hunting forevermore? Or is it our purpose simply to accept this godless world without inherent meaning as our truth, the way existentialists largely did?

When Sartre claimed Man is condemned to be free (Sartre 1945), Sal became overwhelmed by the limitlessness of the road. In a universe without inherent purpose, the freedom to give life meaning becomes a crushing burden, and the possibility of endless choices becomes suffocating. He kisses a hundred women, tries a thousand drugs, drives a million miles, and he still does not know what for. The highway is like the hill, and Sal is Sisyphus. So Camus concluded with the inherent absurdity of our existence (Camus 1955), and Sal blamed the resulting sadness on God, and slowly, like to Nietzsche, he was dead to him (Kerouac 2007, p. 57; Nietzsche 1882). In his great escape from the American Dream, Kerouac doesn’t offer answers; he documents the endless search, the vicious cycle of recurring hunger and momentary satisfaction, paralleling an absurdist conclusion. We are condemned to search for meaning, but each new high, be it a job promotion or the main road exit, is followed by a comedown.

It is a noble attempt, especially in its futility, to search for meaning in a universe that offers no guidance whatsoever. And yet, it is not Kerouac’s rejection of normalcy that makes him so admirable, but this exact, excruciating honesty, that his alternative is not necessarily any better. After all, who needs a white picket fence and the newest serial bed frame when benzos keep you awake, and Denver flophouses do the job just as well? The American post-war society was sick from the national illusion of a stable and prosperous future as the “point of it all,” but Kerouac himself could not seem to find a cure. As he admitted in Big Sur: An awful realization that I have been fooling myself all my life thinking there was a next thing to do to keep the show going and I’m just a sick clown and so is everybody else (Kerouac 1962, p. 33).

And yet, as noble as trying may be, perhaps the whole point is to stop looking for the day after tomorrow, a bit like Camus said: “You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life” (Camus 1977, p. 156). After all, when the last page is read, Sal is still driving, and he could do it all over again tomorrow, the day after, and the future would be just as illusory as it was yesterday and the day before. Or, in the words that Kerouac infamously didn’t say: Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.

References:

Burroughs, S. William. 1953. The Yage Letters.

Camus, Albert. 1955. The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays (translated by Justin O’Brien).

Camus, Albert. 1977. Youthful Writings (translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy). Random House, New York.

Kerouac, Jack. 2007. On the Road. Penguin Modern Classics. Penguin Books.

Kerouac, Jack. 1962. Big Sur. Bantam Books; Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1882. Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Verlag von Ernst Schmeitzner

Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1945. Existentialism Is a Humanism (translated by Philip Mairet). Lecture at Club Maintenant Paris. Transcript: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm (Accessed: 19.07.2025)

Watson, Steven. 1997. Die Beat-Generation: Visionäre, Rebellen und Hipsters, 1944-1960. Hannibal Verlag.