The Dharma Bums

by

Jack Kerouac

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Counterculture and Freedom Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Enlightenment and Nature Theme Icon
Counterculture and Freedom Theme Icon
Friendship Theme Icon
Literature and Authenticity Theme Icon
Inclusion, Exclusion, and Community Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Dharma Bums, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Counterculture and Freedom Theme Icon

Jack Kerouac is often remembered less for his actual work than for the bohemian counterculture he came to represent. Despite its focus on Buddhism, The Dharma Bums is also full of the sex, drunken poetry readings, and spontaneous cross-country journeys that are commonly associated with Kerouac’s name and the Beat Generation movement to which he belonged. Indeed, Kerouac’s self-indulgence, wanderings, and commitment to Buddhism shared a common root. Namely, they’re based on his critique of mainstream American culture, which he saw as materialistic, status-obsessed, spiritually isolating, anti-intellectual, and needlessly conformist. Writing in the 1950s, Kerouac argues that mainstream culture produces misery because it values wealth, reputation, and stability—which tie people down rather than freeing them. However, through his alter ego Ray Smith’s journey, he shows how pursuing the opposite of these mainstream values—poverty, humility, and transience—can lead to true freedom.

Kerouac thoroughly critiques the mainstream culture of white suburban America in the 1950s, which he viewed as materialistic and unenlightened. After one of his first parties with Japhy Ryder, Alvah Goldbrook, and Warren Coughlin, Ray looks around and decides, “The rooftops of Berkeley looked like pitiful living meat sheltering grieving phantoms from the eternality of the heavens which they feared to face.” What he means is that people who live ordinary American lives in ordinary American homes and workplaces are entirely focused on material things that don’t really matter. This distracts them from the true reality of the universe and makes them unhappy. In fact, Ray and Japhy profoundly distrust modern technology in general. For instance, Ray considers cars abominable because they prevent people from using their natural mode of locomotion: walking. Similarly, Japhy says he distrusts people who use toilets because they just flush things away, rather than taking responsibility for disposing of the waste they create. This shows that they both view technology as people’s foolish attempt to distance themselves from human nature.

Kerouac also argues that American culture’s obsession with work and wealth makes people unhappy. When Ray visits his mother, sister, and brother-in-law in North Carolina, he is amused to see the local farmers pretend to work all day. In reality, it’s December, everything is frozen, and they have nothing to do. But American culture values work, and the farmers want to get away from their wives, so they walk around their farms and look for something to do. Meanwhile, they criticize Ray for not having a job. Ray considers this amusingly ironic and points out that the men are deceiving themselves. As an avowed Buddhist, Ray believes that there’s really nothing for people to do in the world except change, suffer, and pass in and out of existence. The farmers are merely inventing meaningless tasks in order to escape their anxieties about doing nothing and their fear that their wives will bother them. This suggests that their whole lives are driven by a sense of obligation, while they have no clear idea about what they really want in life or how to get it. For Ray, this is a clear example of what American culture does to people: it asks them to perform meaningless tasks in order to accumulate meaningless objects that don’t make them any happier.

Instead, Kerouac presents the so-called “Dharma Bum” lifestyle as a freer and more humane alternative to mainstream culture. Ray and his friends refuse mainstream culture by choosing to live as “bums,” or unemployed homeless travelers. They move around rather than settle in one place, own as few possessions as possible, and work temporary jobs rather than stable ones. As bums, they spend their time writing and meditating on the nature of the universe, which is called dharma in Buddhism. That’s why he uses the term “Dharma Bums” to refer to himself, his friends, and his book.

Ray chooses homelessness because it allows him to be completely spontaneous, which he equates with absolute freedom. When hopping a train, meeting strangers hitchhiking, or camping in the woods, Ray feels totally liberated and alive in a way that he thinks settled people never can. Similarly, he decides to live out of a rucksack, relying only on essential gear and his own ingenuity, because this limits his expenses, makes it easier to move around, and proves that happiness doesn’t come from material things. Ray also rejects conventional work and instead only takes on temporary jobs when he absolutely needs the money. For instance, he helps Sean Monahan chop wood and works as a fire lookout in the Cascades because he thinks this will give him an opportunity to meditate in nature. But neither of these jobs defines his identity in the way an office worker’s might. While American culture presents work as the cornerstone of identity, Ray insists that it is nothing more than a means to an end. And Ray also tries to teach others about the virtues of voluntary poverty and homelessness. For instance, while hitchhiking with a truck driver named Beaudry, Ray makes them dinner by cooking a steak over a campfire in the desert. Beaudry is astonished and realizes that, even though he has a stable job and a loving family at home, he’s nowhere near as happy or free as Ray. He thanks Ray for opening his eyes to true happiness. When Beaudry recognizes that the Dharma Bum lifestyle is superior to his own, this validates Ray’s decision to live unconventionally and prioritize spiritual goals over material ones.

Ultimately, Ray sees his lifestyle choices as breeding thoughtfulness, humility, and (above all) freedom. Because Dharma Bums do not tie themselves down to physical places or things, they do not mistake their possessions for their identity. Instead, Ray believes that they are free to wander and explore, change and develop, and spread happiness and enlightenment wherever they go.

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Counterculture and Freedom Quotes in The Dharma Bums

Below you will find the important quotes in The Dharma Bums related to the theme of Counterculture and Freedom.
Chapter 3 Quotes

I wondered why Han Shan was Japhy's hero.

“Because,” said he, “he was a poet, a mountain man, a Buddhist dedicated to the principle of meditation on the essence of all things, a vegetarian too by the way though I haven't got on that kick from figuring maybe in this modern world to be a vegetarian is to split hairs a little since all sentient beings eat what they can. And he was a man of solitude who could take off by himself and live purely and true to himself.”

“That sounds like you too.”

Related Characters: Ray Smith (speaker), Japhy Ryder (speaker), Han Shan
Related Symbols: Mountains
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

“You know when I was a little kid in Oregon I didn't feel that I was an American at all, with all that suburban ideal and sex repression and general dreary newspaper gray censorship of all our real human values but and when I discovered Buddhism and all I suddenly felt that I had lived in a previous lifetime innumerable ages ago and now because of faults and sins in that lifetime I was being degraded to a more grievous domain of existence and my karma was to be born in America where nobody has any fun or believes in anything, especially freedom. That's why I was always sympathetic to freedom movements, too, like anarchism in the Northwest, the oldtime heroes of Everett Massacre and all…”

Related Characters: Japhy Ryder (speaker), Ray Smith
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:

He was always being bugged by my little lectures on Samadhi ecstasy, which is the state you reach when you stop everything and stop your mind and you actually with your eyes closed see a kind of eternal multiswarm of electrical Power of some kind ululating in place of just pitiful images and forms of objects, which are, after all, imaginary.

[…]

“Don't you think it's much more interesting just to be like Japhy and have girls and studies and good times and really be doing something, than all this silly sitting under trees?”

“Nope,” I said, and meant it, and I knew Japhy would agree with me. “All Japhy's doing is amusing himself in the void.”

“I don't think so.”

“I bet he is. I'm going mountainclimbing with him next week and find out and tell you.”

Related Characters: Ray Smith (speaker), Alvah Goldbrook (speaker), Japhy Ryder
Related Symbols: Mountains
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

Japhy and I were kind of outlandish-looking on the campus in our old clothes in fact Japhy was considered an eccentric around the campus, which is the usual thing for campuses and college people to think whenever a real man appears on the scene—colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization.

Related Characters: Ray Smith (speaker), Japhy Ryder
Related Symbols: Mountains
Page Number: 38-39
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

The vision: it's pure morning in the high dry Sierras, far off clean firs can be seen shadowing the sides of rocky hills, further yet snowcapped pinpoints, nearer the big bushy forms of pines and there's Japhy in his little cap with a big rucksack on his back, clomping along, but with a flower in his left hand which is hooked to the strap of the rucksack at his breast; grass grows out between crowded rocks and boulders; distant sweeps of scree can be seen making gashes down the sides of morning, his eyes shine with joy, he's on his way, his heroes are John Muir and Han Shan and Shih-te and Li Po and John Burroughs and Paul Bunyan and Kropotkin; he's small and has a funny kind of belly […] because his spine curves a bit, but that's offset by the vigorous long steps he takes […] and his chest is deep and shoulders broad.

Related Characters: Ray Smith (speaker), Japhy Ryder, Han Shan
Related Symbols: Mountains
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

I promised myself that I would begin a new life. “All over the West, and the mountains in the East, and the desert, I'll tramp with a rucksack and make it the pure way.”

Related Characters: Ray Smith (speaker)
Related Symbols: Mountains
Page Number: 77
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

“I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the Bard, the Zen Lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wander­ers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general de­mand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deodorants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em.”

Related Characters: Japhy Ryder (speaker)
Related Symbols: Mountains
Page Number: 97-98
Explanation and Analysis:

“Yessir, that's what, a series of monasteries for fellows to go and monastate and meditate in, we can have groups of shacks up in the Sierras or the High Cascades or even Ray says down in Mexico and have big wild gangs of pure holy men getting to­gether to drink and talk and pray, think of the waves of salva­tion can flow out of nights like that, and finally have women, too, wives, small huts with religious families, like the old days of the Puritans. Who's to say the cops of America and the Republicans and Democrats are gonna tell everybody what to do?”

Related Characters: Japhy Ryder (speaker), Ray Smith
Related Symbols: Mountains, Alcohol
Page Number: 99
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

I wanted to get me a full pack complete with everything necessary to sleep, shelter, eat, cook, in fact a regular kitchen and bedroom right on my back, and go off somewhere and find perfect soli­tude and look into the perfect emptiness of my mind and be completely neutral from any and all ideas. I intended to pray, too, as my only activity, pray for all living creatures; I saw it was the only decent activity left in the world. […] I didn't want to have anything to do, really, either with Japhy's ideas about society (I figured it would be better just to avoid it altogether, walk around it) or with any of Alvah's ideas about grasping after life as much as you can because of its sweet sadness and because you would be dead some day.

Related Characters: Ray Smith (speaker), Japhy Ryder, Alvah Goldbrook
Page Number: 105-106
Explanation and Analysis: