The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The basis for the novel's semi-fictional accounts are events occurring years after the events of On the Road. The main characters are the narrator Ray Smith, based on Kerouac, and Japhy Ryder, based on the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, who was instrumental in Kerouac's introduction to Buddhism in the mid-1950s. The book concerns duality in Kerouac's life and ideals, examining the relationship of the outdoors, mountaineering, hiking, and hitchhiking through the west US with his "city life" of jazz clubs, poetry readings, and drunken parties. The protagonist's search for a "Buddhist" context to his experiences recurs throughout the story. The book had a significant influence on the Hippie counterculture of the 1960s.
Plot summary
The character Japhy drives Ray Smith's story, whose penchant for simplicity and Zen Buddhism influenced Kerouac on the eve of the sudden and unpredicted success of On the Road. The action shifts between the events of Smith and Ryder's "city life," such as three-day parties and enactments of the Buddhist "Yab-Yum" rituals, to the sublime and peaceful imagery where Kerouac seeks a type of transcendence. The novel concludes with a change in narrative style, with Kerouac working alone as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak, in what would soon be declared North Cascades National Park. His summer on Desolation Peak was desperately lonely. “Many's the time I thought I'd die of boredom or jump off the mountain,” he wrote in Desolation Angels. Yet in TheDharma Bums, Kerouac described the experience in elegiac prose.
Down on the lake rosy reflections of celestial vapor appeared, and I said 'God, I love you' and looked up to the sky and really meant it. 'I have fallen in love with you, God. Take care of us all, one way or the other.’
The blend of narrative with prose-poetry places The Dharma Bums at a critical juncture foreshadowing the consciousness-probing works of several authors in the 1960s such as Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey. One episode in the book features Smith, Ryder, and Henry Morley climbing Matterhorn Peak in California. It relates Kerouac's introduction to this type of mountaineering and inspired him to spend the following summer as a fire lookout for the United States Forest Service on Desolation Peak in Washington. Chapter 2 of the novel gives an account of the legendary 1955 Six Gallery reading, where Allen Ginsberg gave a debut presentation of his poem "Howl". At the event, other authors including Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen also performed.
Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbrook was reading his poem 'Wail' drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling 'Go! Go! Go!' and old Rheinhold Cacoethes the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness.
Character key
Kerouac often based his fictional characters on friends and family.
Real-life person
Character name
Jack Kerouac
Ray Smith
Gary Snyder
Japhy Ryder
Allen Ginsberg
Alvah Goldbook
Neal Cassady
Cody Pomeray
Philip Whalen
Warren Coughlin
Locke McCorkle
Sean Monahan
John Montgomery
Henry Morley
Philip Lamantia
Francis DaPavia
Michael McClure
Ike O'Shay
Peter Orlovsky
George
Kenneth Rexroth
Rheinhold Cacoethes
Alan Watts
Arthur Whane
Caroline Kerouac
Nin
Carolyn Cassady
Evelyn
Claude Dalenberg
Bud Diefendorf
Natalie Jackson
Rosie Buchanan
Reception
Gary Snyder wrote Kerouac saying "Dharma Bums is a beautiful book, & I am amazed & touched that you should say so many nice things about me because that period was for me really a great process of learning from you..." but confided to Philip Whalen, "I do wish Jack had taken more trouble to smooth out dialogues, etc. Transitions are rather abrupt sometimes." Later, Snyder chided Kerouac for the book's misogynistic interpretation of Buddhism.
