At the End of the Road: Jack Kerouac in Mexico

Building on his previous work about the Beats’ time south of the border, García-Robles (The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico) delivers a fast-paced, highly editorialized version of Kerouac’s handful of trips to Mexico. The narrative, scraped together out of the many literary snippets the writer (and his friends) left behind, follows the time line of Kerouac’s intermittent visits, made between 1950 and 1961. With such a wealth of literature concerning Kerouac already in existence, García-Robles doesn’t concentrate on revisiting the facts. Instead, he uses quotes from Kerouac’s fiction to trace his subject’s inner life and place Mexico within the larger context of the famed novelist’s artistic evolution. At times, he even seems to take up the voice of Mexico itself, speaking to the uninformed American traveler. In the end, the book complicates the vision Kerouac presented in On the Road and other books. “[Kerouac] experienced yet another Mexican epiphany: It ‘was one of the great mystic rippling moments of my life—I saw right then that Enrique was great and that the Indian, the Mexican is great, straight, simple and perfect.’ Dream on, Jackie.” [em](Nov.) [/em]