Ray Smith, Jack Kerouac’s protagonist and alter-ego in The Dharma Bums, spends much of the novel suspicious of other people and trying to get as far away from them as possible. Nevertheless, his drunken adventures and forays into Buddhism wouldn’t be the same without his eccentric friends. Most of all, Ray idolizes his friend Japhy Ryder: he talks about Japhy with an almost romantic love that contrasts with his indifference to almost everyone else. This suggests that Kerouac draws a clear distinction between authentic friendship, which helps people learn and grow, and inauthentic or surface-level friendship, which actually distracts people from their true needs and leaves them spiritually empty.
Ray’s relationship with Japhy shows how friendship can help people improve themselves and discover totally new ways of living. Japhy serves as a kind of mentor figure to Ray, who’s impressed by Japhy’s masterful poetry, Buddhist self-discipline, knowledge of Chinese and Japanese, and rugged masculinity. Throughout the book, Ray and Japhy hike, party, and read poetry together. Most of all, they frequently meditate side by side and tell each other stories about different Buddhas and Zen masters. Ray reveres Japhy largely because Japhy has more experience with Buddhism, hiking, and women—he hopes that some of this expertise will rub off on him. Essentially, Ray becomes friends with Japhy because he wants to be more like him. In fact, Ray’s love for Japhy is practically romantic—there’s a homoerotic undertone to Kerouac’s detailed descriptions of Japhy’s body, for instance, and Ray is devastated when Japhy leaves California to go study in Japan. Even when Japhy isn’t physically present, Ray is constantly dreaming and thinking about him, which shows his extreme dedication to their friendship. Japhy arguably becomes the book’s central figure because he helps Ray focus his general interest in Buddhism into a specific kind of religious life as a traveling Dharma Bum. All the major decisions Ray takes in the novel—from living out of a rucksack to working as a fire lookout in the Cascade Range—are really just attempts to imitate Japhy, because Ray deeply appreciates Japhy’s influence and role in his life. Therefore, The Dharma Bums testifies to friendship’s capacity to shape people’s lives by showing them aspects of human experience that they would never encounter otherwise.
Nevertheless, Ray also turns his back on friendships that he considers less authentic, which shows that he values friendship because of how it helps him grow, not merely because he wants companionship. On their trip to Mount Matterhorn, Ray and Japhy are accompanied by Henry Morley, a bizarre, talkative, and extremely annoying librarian. Henry talks nonsense for hours on end, which makes it impossible for Ray and Japhy to hold an interesting conversation. Actually, Ray is relieved when Henry disappears in the middle of his hike to go do maintenance on his car. In fact, Ray generally sees most people as similar to Henry—they talk just for the sake of talking, have no authentic insight into themselves or the world, and add nothing of value to Ray’s life. Accordingly, Ray’s suspicion of Henry reflects his underlying belief that it’s better for people to be alone than to be surrounded by others who neither share their values nor contribute meaningfully to transforming those values. Similarly, after returning to California from North Carolina, Ray moves into a cabin with Japhy. The Buddhist couple who owns the house in front of the cabin, Sean and Christine Monahan, throw parties every weekend. But Ray quickly gets bored of partying because he it as a distraction from his Buddhist practice, so he starts meditating or napping under a tree instead of going to the parties. In fact, even during Japhy’s going-away party, Ray and Japhy get so fed up with other people that they decide to run away and go for a hike. Their decision to run away together proves that their friendship is uniquely valuable to both of them, while their surface-level friendships with others do not contribute anything meaningful to their happiness or personal growth.
The Dharma Bums is in many ways an ode to friendship, which Kerouac values because it helps people grow. However, it’s worth asking whether this is a fundamentally self-serving conception: does Kerouac want to give anything back to his friends, or just want them to enrich his life? Arguably, Ray risks viewing Japhy as just one more step along the path to enlightenment. Meanwhile, Ray views himself as an isolated, self-sufficient individual who doesn’t need to worry about others. That said, Kerouac does emphasize that friendship is a reciprocal, meaning that both sides need to contribute. For instance, he differentiates between Ray’s parties with Japhy, Alvah, and Warren (where everyone gets drunk, reads poetry together, and ends up feeling like they understand the universe) and the boring parties at the Monahans’ house (which are full of empty banter). The first parties represent authentic friendship because everyone contributes to the group, and everyone grows by participating. In other words, Kerouac suggests that authentic friendship requires giving as well as receiving, and this can make it the basis for forming an authentic (or truly free) community. After all, this is why Japhy envisions forming a community of roaming Dharma Bums who live in shacks, write poetry, and work together to help enlighten one another and the world as a whole.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Friendship ThemeTracker
Friendship Quotes in The Dharma Bums
I really believed in the reality of charity and kindness and humility and zeal and neutral tranquillity and wisdom and ecstasy, and I believed that I was an oldtime bhikku in modern clothes wandering the world (usually the immense triangular arc of New York to Mexico City to San Francisco) in order to turn the wheel of the True Meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for myself as a future Buddha (Awakener) and as a future Hero in Paradise. I had not met Japhy Ryder yet, I was about to the next week, or heard anything about “Dharma Bums” although at this time I was a perfect Dharma Bum myself and considered myself a religious wanderer.
Every time he said something he would turn and look at Japhy and deliver these rather brilliant inanities with a complete deadpan; I couldn't understand what kind of strange secret scholarly linguistic clown he really was under these California skies. Or Japhy would mention sleeping bags, and Morley would ramble in with “I'm going to be the possessor of a pale blue French sleeping bag, light weight, goose down, good buy I think, find 'em in Vancouver—good for Daisy Mae. Completely wrong type for Canada. Everyone wants to know if her grandfather was an explorer who met an Eskimo. I'm from the North Pole myself.”
“What's he talking about?” I'd ask from the back seat, and Japhy: “He's just an interesting tape recorder.”
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.
“I sit down and say, and I run all my friends and relatives and enemies one by one in this, without entertaining any angers or gratitudes or anything, and I say, like ‘Japhy Ryder, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha,’ then I run on, say, to ‘David O. Selznick, equally empty, equally to be loved, equally a coming Buddha’ though I don’t use names like David O. Selznick, just people I know because when I say the words ‘equally a coming Buddha’ I want to be thinking of their eyes, like you take Morley, his blue eyes behind those glasses, when you think ‘equally a coming Buddha’ you think of those eyes and you really do suddenly see the true secret serenity and the truth of his coming Buddhahood. Then you think of your enemy’s eyes.”
Once I opened my eyes and saw Japhy sitting there rigid as a rock and I felt like laughing he looked so funny. But the mountains were mighty solemn, and so was Japhy, and for that matter so was I, and in fact laughter is solemn.
It was beautiful. The pinkness vanished and then it was all purple dusk and the roar of the silence was like a wash of diamond waves going through the liquid porches of our ears, enough to soothe a man a thousand years. I prayed for Japhy, for his future safety and happiness and eventual Buddhahood. It was all completely serious, all completely hallucinated, all completely happy.
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.”
“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?”
Japhy said “Why do you sit on your ass all day?”
“I practice do-nothing.”
“What's the difference? Burn it, my Buddhism is activity,” said Japhy rushing off down the hill again. Then I could hear him sawing wood and whistling in the distance. He couldn't stop jiggling for a minute. His meditations were regular things, by the clock, he'd meditated first thing waking in the morning then he had his mid-afternoon meditation, only about three minutes long, then before going to bed and that was that. But I just ambled and dreamed around. We were two strange dissimilar monks on the same path.
Suddenly a green and rose rainbow shafted right down into Starvation Ridge not three hundred yards away from my door, like a bolt, like a pillar: it came among steaming clouds and orange sun turmoiling.
What is a rainbow, Lord?
A hoop
For the lowly.
It hooped right into Lightning Creek, rain and snow fell simultaneous, the lake was milkwhite a mile below, it was just too crazy. I went outside and suddenly my shadow was ringed by the rainbow as I walked on the hilltop, a lovely-haloed mystery making me want to pray. “O Ray, the career of your life is like a raindrop in the illimitable ocean which is eternal awakenerhood. Why worry ever any more? Write and tell Japhy that.”
And suddenly it seemed I saw that unimaginable little Chinese bum standing there, in the fog, with that expressionless humor on his seamed face. […] It was the realer-than-life Japhy of my dreams, and he stood there saying nothing. “Go away, thieves of the mind!” he cried down the hollows of the unbelievable Cascades. […] “Japhy,” I said out loud, “I don't know when we'll meet again or what'll happen in the future, but Desolation, Desolation, I owe so much to Desolation, thank you forever for guiding me to the place where I learned all. Now comes the sadness of coming back to cities and I've grown two months older and there's all that humanity of bars and burlesque shows and gritty love, all upsidedown in the void God bless them, but Japhy you and me forever we know, O ever youthful, O ever weeping.”
And in keeping with Japhy's habit of always getting down on one knee and delivering a little prayer to the camp we left, to the one in the Sierra, and the others in Marin, and the little prayer of gratitude he had delivered to Sean's shack the day he sailed away, as I was hiking down the mountain with my pack I turned and knelt on the trail and said “Thank you, shack.” Then I added “Blah,” with a little grin, because I knew that shack and that mountain would understand what that meant, and turned and went on down the trail back to this world.
