The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Dharma Bums
Book Review: A Refreshing Place to Visit
Summary: 4 Stars
I enjoyed this novel. It seems very much a story of ideas rather than a conventional story with a plot. While I'd heard of this book, it was interesting to finally read 47 years after publication. The description of wilderness and hiking was exceptionally well done. I found some of the Buddhist levels confusing because they were unfamiliar to me. But I appreciated the idea of "emptiness." To have a way of observing life and appreciating its beauty as well as its pain creates a context from which experience can be treasured for its cosmic connectedness, even as it zooms by for we humans with a lightning-fast pace. I was unaware that part of the novel was set in North Carolina. It added immediacy for me to the story. I could readily relate to the pine forests of our lovely state and Ray's family's attitudes. The two main characters of Ray & Japhy were interesting foils. Ray's search seemed to bring him satisfaction. Japhy's exit to Japan left the ending chapters on Desolation Mountain with Ray's solitary search more reflections than a traditional conclusion of a plot. The book breezes by with fewer than 200 pages and immerses you totally in a non-materialistic value system which was a refreshing place to visit. Happy trails!Book Review: A better travel companion than On The Road
Summary: 3 Stars
Dharma Bums is On The Road realized. As is most of Karouac's books, D.B. is about longing for the search. It actualy has little to do with Zen and the such but represents a thought common to all souls. Beautiful nievity and un-understood wisdom. For anyone on a path of couriosity and truth. For more on Zen try looking up Robert Pirsig.Book Review: A book to live by.
Summary: 5 Stars
Dahrma Bums by Jack Kerouac has forever changed my life. It has tauhgt me that life is a valuable thing that should not be wasted. Wasted with worries, work, materialistic pre-occupations, and with how others may perceive you. Dahrma Bums is an eye opener. It totally blew me away. Go out and get and live your life.Book Review: A cool drink
Summary: 5 Stars
DHARMA BUMS came out a year after ON THE ROAD. While the latter is the beat manifesto celebrating the peripatetic lifestyle, BUMS focuses on the beat romance with Buddhist enlightenment and the building of an inner life. ON THE ROAD was an instant, memorable success, and while BUMS no doubt fed a desire for more of the same, it stands apart, its own satisfying work of art, its own way of sending telegraphs from the heart of the beat movement. Many of the episodes are based on actual events and experiences that were still fresh memories as the book was written.Ray Smith is the first person narrator of DHARMA BUMS, a look alike for Jack Kerouac. For most of the book, he slyly puts Japhy Ryder at the center of attention. Ryder is a stand-in for poet Gary Snyder who survives, who as a young man in his twenties was already a natural leader. Surrounding them are other familiar figures from the era, including Alvah Goldbook (translates to Allen Ginsberg). They all write poetry and love jazz, women, and a casual lifestyle. They seek spiritual enlightenment. They delight in trolling for clothes in the Good Will and Army and Navy stores, they savor the simplest meal over a campfire. They are the Dharma Bums, rejecting the paralyzed emptiness they ascribe to middle class life.
I really like this book. The prose is clear and concrete, even when sorting through abstract notions. It is often funny. Kerouac had extraordinary insight into individual nuances and desires, and plays them into the tension of the journey and the sorting out. He had a gift for seeing how outsiders might perceive him and his crowd and how history might come to interpret the present he was portraying. Though he is legendarily perceived as a spontaneous artist, there is extraordinary control and shape imposed on these pages. Only twice does he momentarily break his world: once, in my edition, he slips and refers to Japhy as Gary, and another time, slipping out of the immediacy of the action, he pays a compliment to a simple meal on the road, noting that even as a lionized young writer in New York, he had not had a better meal in an upscale restaurant. Those curious nanoseconds can be forgiven, however. This book is a joy.
Book Review: A light-hearted mix of religious lunacy and zest for nature
Summary: 4 Stars
'The Dharma Bums' is a tale of social dropouts in California who search for Buddhist enlightenment and truth (dharma) amid wine, sex, hitchhiking and mountain scenery. It's a good introduction to Kerouac - shorter, lighter and more accessible than On the Road, which is a more epic but also has some monotonous bits. If religious certainties turn you off, you might tire of dharma-bum narrator Ray's Buddhist slogans and the dogmatic Zen views of Japhy, Ray's buddy. But though Kerouac portrays Buddhism as liberating, he also laughs a lot at kooky piety. At some points - like Ray's 'banana sermon' - religion becomes either profound or hilarious, or both.
Ray tries to reach nirvana by convincing himself the world's an illusion, which makes it ironic that the best bits in this novel are poetic descriptions of mountains and travel. The final lonely mountain-top vigil - based on Kerouac's experience as a fire lookout, described in Lonesome Traveller - is a tour de force. Kerouac's prose flair allows him to string 10 adjectives in front of a noun, a heinous crime in modern writing fashion, and get away with it.
Kerouac balances Ray and Japhy's Buddhist belief that the world is illusory against the earthbound views of world-weary poet Alvah Goldbook, a thinly veiled Allen Ginsberg. Alvah's quest to soak up his surroundings rather than transcend them puts him closer to the philosophy of On the Road, in which the travelling bums reach a jubilant but sad-hearted state of raw appreciation of their phsyical world.
Through the Ray-Japhy-Alvah triangle and all the minor characters, 'The Dharma Bums' gives various answers to Kerouac's big question in this and other books: how to lead a free existence in a conformist careerist consumerist society. Fifty years later, the question's got more vital. Youthful rebellion and boheme are just marketing motifs for soft drinks, CDs and snowboards now, but Kerouac shows you it's possible to be authentically free - if you have the guts.