Summary
Jack Kerouac: Underground
Driven by a mystical, almost religious need to know the essence of life, Kerouac, like some prose Blake, Baudelaire or Rimbaud, in his narration focuses on individuals through which the eternal, timeless questions of human existence speak. Through Underground, through Leo Percipide who is consistently honest, in the distraction of his mind and his senses, devotedly recording the truth, Kerouac approaches the resolution of key relationships between people governed by love, sexuality, jealousy, success, failure, friendships, envy, alcohol, music, drugs, the subconscious. With medical accuracy, he illuminates true, deeply inexpressible feelings and inner motives and exposes them to the reader's view without fear or shame, down to the last detail. An insight into life is possible only for those who participate in life with their whole being, and the book Underground, like Kerouac's other novels, abounds with the peculiarity of life experience and the depth of the experiential interior. It is precisely this Dionysian approach to life and writing that forms the core of the novel Underground and, if Ginsberg is to be believed, the very core of Jack Kerouac as a writer.
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