Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Dharma Bums, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Enlightenment and Nature
Counterculture and Freedom
Friendship
Literature and Authenticity
Inclusion, Exclusion, and Community
Summary
Analysis
Dressed in his new flannel and jeans, Ray wanders around San Francisco to test out his new rucksack. Some Skid Row bums are convinced that he’s going to go hunting for uranium and try to give him advice. Then, Ray visits his friend Cody and Cody’s girlfriend Rosie, who’s having a nervous breakdown. Rosie got in trouble at work for clogging the toilet with a huge piece of paper, on which she’d listed all her friends’ sins. Then, she started trying to cut her wrists with a dull old knife. Now, she’s convinced that the police are coming after all her friends, so Cody asks Ray to look after her while he’s at work.
Although they only appear briefly in the novel, Cody and Rosie are a crucial turning point in Ray’s journey. So far, Ray and his friends have largely been carefree. But now, precisely when Ray is planning to embark on his new life, his old friends’ issues come back to haunt him. Rosie’s obsession with sin, redemption, and persecution resembles Ray’s concern about how to square his Buddhism with his vices. However, while Ray struggles with how to stop sinning in the future, Rosie is plagued with guilt over the past.
Themes
Ray jokes with Rosie and tells her about his “rucksack revolution.” He feels a sense of moral righteousness, like when he argues with his friends and family about Dharma. He tells Rosie to relax, because “all this life is just a dream,” but she insists that the police conspiracy is real. Ray gets some wine and brings some friends back to party in Cody and Rosie’s apartment, but Rosie tells him that she plans to die tonight.
Ray continues trying to pass on the wisdom he’s learned from Japhy, but there’s a sharp contrast between his optimistic fantasy of starting a “rucksack revolution” and Rosie’s intense despair. Seemingly blinded by his own good humor, Ray fails to see that Rosie is in a life-or-death situation, so he doesn’t take her seriously or empathize with her.
Themes
After his friends leave, Ray goes to sleep. Unbeknownst to him, Rosie goes to the roof, breaks a skylight, and cuts herself with the glass. A neighbor calls the police, and Rosie leaps off the roof to get away from them. She falls six floors and dies on the sidewalk. When Ray learns this in the morning, he’s astonished, and he wonders if his philosophy might be all wrong. But he decides to get moving anyway; he rides a freight train back to Los Angeles and hopes that Rosie made it to Heaven.
Rosie’s suicide shocks Ray out of his trancelike optimism. While he believes that people can learn to overcome their suffering through introspection and self-discipline, Rosie’s death reminds him that people’s suffering is often far more complex and far-reaching than it might initially appear.
Themes
