Bop jazz separated from its mainstream predecessor when musicians such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk began to emphasize fast tempo and improvisation over predictable music of the swing era. These renegade musicians valued spontaneity and inspired many listeners. It's no coincidence that these Bop jazz musicians were Jack Kerouac's first musical choice. These musicians left an indelible mark on Kerouac, as evidenced by the numerous references to jazz in his works. So to some extent, knowing bop jazz means knowing something about Jack Kerouac, and knowing something about Jack Kerouac means knowing something about bop jazz. Likewise, if improvisation is essential to jazz bop and Kerouac's writing is heavily influenced by jazz, it seems likely that features of Kerouac's writings contain elements of improvisation. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Two characteristics in particular can be traced from Kerouac's early novels such as On the Road through his career to his later works such as Big Sur. One of the indispensable features of Kerouac's writing is the feverish geographical movement that he and his characters demonstrated. The other very notable aspect of his writing is his free-flowing, stream-of-consciousness sentences that make up his novels and poems. While otherwise seemingly unrelated, these motifs of incessant geographic movement and flowing phrases are related to each other in their use of improvisation. To better understand these two characteristics and how they relate to improvisation, one should first examine the nature of improvisation itself and then see how it relates to each individual component (geography and phrase structure). Since jazz pioneered and personifies improvisation and its profound influence on Kerouac so well, understanding the relationship between Kerouac's writings and jazz is essential to fully understanding Kerouac's writing. Improvisation occurs when a musician departs from the melody, venturing into an unpremeditated fury of creativity and expression. The result of this improvisation in jazz is a raw, never identical expression, characteristic of the musician every evening depending on his mood and feelings. Instead of confining the musician to simply playing a song note for note, jazz used improvisation to, as Dean Moriarty describes it in On the Road, "...tell the story and put down the real relaxation and knowledge" ( 126). Kerouac's writings are full of references to various jazz musicians. The Subterraneans references Charlie 'Bird' Parker saying, "going back to the Red Drum for sets, to listen to Bird, who I distinctly saw dig Mardou several times and also myself directly in my eyes trying to find out if I was really the great writer that I thought he knew my thoughts and my ambitions…” (14), the reader sees an interaction between the jazz great and Kerouac (through his alter ego Leo). so intimate between the two artists that Parker seems to be able to read Kerouac's thoughts. This example shows the extent to which Kerouac's writing idealized the world of jazz is seen in the character of Dean Moriarty the experience of when Moriarty listened to George Shearing: Dean was sweating; sweat was dripping down his collar. “There he is!” It's him! Old God Shearing! YES!all of Dean's gasps and curses, he could feel it even though he couldn't see. …When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. “God's empty chair,” he said (On the Road 119). Again, the effects of jazz are seen on Kerouac's characters. Hearing Shearing play turned Moriarty into a "madman" and even called Shearing "God". Here you see a bit of the improvisation of jazz when Dean, being very involved in the music, keeps shouting 'Yes!' Kerouac points out that Shearing was aware of Dean's presence behind him. Therefore, in this symbiotic relationship between the musician influencing the audience and the audience in turn influencing the musician is an example of improvisation. The crux of this is that Kerouac was greatly influenced by jazz, and the jazz he so admired was brought forward by improvisation. Even a recreational reading of Kerouac's writings makes it clear that feverish geographical movement is essential to his works. Reading On the Road, you're likely to get lost in exactly which part of the continent Sal Paradise is located on and whether it's heading toward Lowell, Massachusetts, or away from it. His other works also offer no respite from this confusion. In The Dharma Bums, protagonist Ray Smith describes his hitchhiking into the mountains by saying, "The people who picked me up were loggers, uranium prospectors, farmers, they took me through the last big town in Skagit Valley, Sedro Woolley, an agricultural market town, and then out as the road became narrower and curvier between the bluffs and the Skagit River, which we had crossed on 99 like a dreamy belly river with meadows on both sides was now a pure stream of melted snow that ran narrow and fast between muddy obstacles coasts (222-223). This excerpt contains multiple features of Kerouac's hasty geography. The people encountered and the cities passed through are given as lists rather than chronologies; loggers who carried him through the Skagit Valley, Kerouac piles people upon other people and places upon other places His feverish enactment of movement parallels the feverish desire of his character to reach a certain place. This excerpt also provides a further parallel to Smith's movement by noting the movement of the river. Not only is Smith's geographic movement picking up speed toward his destination, but so is the river he is tracing toward the coast. The previous passage provides an excellent representation of Kerouac's incessant movement but does not portray improvisation as well as some; it's full of speed but the jazz feel isn't there. Big Sur's depiction of a late-night drive to San Francisco portrays Kerouac's jazzy spontaneity well: So almost dawn and here we are cutting Buchanan and around the corner on screeching wheels and he opens it, speeds towards a stoplight red then suddenly turns left and goes full speed up a hill, when we get to the top I imagine he'll stop a bit to see what's up but he goes even faster and practically flies off the hill hill and we go down one of those incredibly steep streets in San Francisco with our nose pointed towards the waters of the Bay and he steps on the accelerator! (85)Improvisation is seen at different levels in this passage. Initially, the spontaneity of getting into the car on a whim to go into town is improvised. The journey is not premeditated and planned but rather a spark in the mind that ignites an adventure. Subsequently, Kerouac's diction conveys both speed and jazz-like onomatopoeic qualities. Words like fullblast, cuttin and sudden have a spontaneous meaning while onomatopoeias like stridor andzipping bring an improvised sound. This choice of words is a form of improvisation Kerouac uses to apply words to a uniquely spontaneous event. You can see many parallels between musical styles and writing styles. In other words, fast-paced musical compositions have their parallel in measured verse; Bach's baroque compositions have a tight form similar to the iambic pentametric poetry of Alexander Pope. Likewise, the musical styles of Thelonious Monk and other bop jazz musicians are similar to the stream-of-consciousness writing style. Jack Kerouac's literary style (typically seen as a stream-of-consciousness style) is free-flowing, spontaneous, and jazzy: very improvisational. Kerouac's prose places greater value on the feeling aroused than on the thought transmitted and achieves this through multiple literary techniques. One of Kerouac's most famous quotes demonstrates his frenetic style well: The only people for me are crazy people, those who are crazy to live, crazy to talk, crazy to save themselves, wanting everything at the same time, those who never yawn nor do they say a trivial thing, but they burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the central blue light burst and everyone goes Awww! (On the Road 5)It is no mistake that this selection has received such notoriety. Kerouac's literary techniques are numerous and the result is captivating. Kerouac makes a list of people by repeatedly underlining the word crazy and repeats burn three times. The effect of this repetition is highly auditory and the prose creates more of a feeling than a thought. The auditory sensation comes from Kerouac's diction. The words burn and crazy are short, discontinuous and easy to repeat; this section can be read very quickly, giving the impression that they themselves are almost crazy. In this way, Kerouac's diction facilitates a highly auditory effect that results in a feeling of madness. This selection is steeped in improvisation, as evidenced by this repetition; it's as if Kerouac couldn't find a better word in that moment to express his feelings, so he took that perfect word and multiplied it to convey the gravity of his point. His writing displays traits of improvisation with its tendency to invoke the same word over and over much as a trumpeter would play the same note in a fit of creative spontaneity. In addition to repetition, Kerouac also conveys improvisation in the subject matter (people being spontaneous), onomatopoeia (pop/'Awww!'), and vivid imagery. One can imagine this is what jazz might look like in written form. This selection of Kerouac's writings is based on the auditory effects of words, but does not depend on this fact. In other words, the selection can be understood completely if not read aloud or without intentional voice inflection. Some of Kerouac's writings (especially his poetry) make essentially little or no sense unless read aloud or with musical accompaniment. This provides another interesting aspect of not only Kerouac's writing style but also his improvisational tendencies. The posthumously published novel Orpheus Emerged is something of an enigma to the Kerouac canon because it is not written like any of his other works. Written in 1945 (predating all of his works except Atop an Underwood), the book shows signs of Kerouac fully grasping his style. The prose is made up of very standard dialogue, and the entire plot takes place in a radius of about five miles. Although Orpheus Emerged seems not to fall into the category of improvisation and the subsequent prose that follows, a key section at the climax of thehistory changes the situation. Kerouac describes the novel's central character, Michael, in his notes as “the genius of imagination and art” (155). Michael, along with the other characters, is portrayed as conversing in a relatively standard, not highly stylistic form of dialogue. However, after his long quest to ascend to God's aesthetic foresight, Michael's genius essentially implodes within itself and he has a nervous breakdown as he grapples with his artistic limitations. Interestingly, the precise moment of artistic revelation is the only point in the novel where stream-of-consciousness dialogue is used. Michael, on the verge of hysteria, screams: “Say something, death. Smug and silent death, omniscient death, stupid death. They tell me the corpses washed out of the rivers are bloated, blue and black, like bloated bullfrogs, glistening with scum…” (135) Once again, typical of Kerouacla's improvisational sentence construction is the listing of stacked attributes one on top of the other along with the repetition of words (in this case death). Although this is the only line in the novel that bears the marks of Kerouac's improvisational writing style, it is important to note the circumstances of the dialogue. In the same way that jazz musicians are artistically limited by the inability to deviate from a given melody, Kerouac's character, Michael, deviates from restricted speech and thought in a moment of artistic revelation. This piece being one of Kerouac's earliest writings, it is important to note that Michael (the artist) emerged in a frenetic form, similar to how Kerouac later blossomed into an artist of frenetic prose. For a long time, readers and critics have sought to understand Kerouac's seemingly unorthodox use of movement and language. There are those who have exalted it as an artistic success, freeing language from the slavery of banality. Others have gone so far as to classify his works as typing rather than writing. Those who considered Kerouac a mediocre writer probably misunderstood the intentions of his writing style and thus turned to unwarranted criticism. Again, drawing on the jazz analogy: trying to find coherent, refined prose in Kerouac is similar to finding a carefully crafted musical score in Miles Davis' Budo. Both of these artists will inevitably be doomed if form and structure are the yardstick. However, when one views Kerouac's writings in light of their intended purpose, his true genius resonates. Kerouac's improvisational scope resulted in prose that was as concerned with sound as with clarity of thought. Looking at Kerouac's use of sound compared to the broader spectrum of writers reveals that he is not as radical as some people have previously thought. Sound has been the trademark of some of the greatest authors in literature. Homer's epic poems were written in dactylic hexameter. Shakespeare's plays were written in iambic pentameter. Both of these works used a highly restrictive meter to create a certain effect when performed aloud. Likewise, Kerouac's prose uses stream of consciousness, onomatopoeia, and diction to create a distinct sound. If his prose lacks clarity when read silently, much can be gained by listening to it. This too is similar to the experience of reading a Shakespeare play versus hearing it performed on stage; something is gained by listening to Shakespeare rather than simply reading his work. Thus, Kerouac's emphasis on the auditory experience is not as cutting-edge as some critics have made it out to be. His position is shared by some.