Literature and Authenticity Theme Analysis

When Ray Smith and his buddies are not hitchhiking, drinking, or spending time in the woods, they’re usually hanging out in their wooden shacks in Berkeley, reading and writing. In fact, meditation and literature are practically the only things they take seriously, and their greatest aspiration is to write poetry that captures the beauty of the world as they see it. In The Dharma Bums, Ray (who’s a stand-in for author Jack Kerouac) turns to books not for pleasure or information, but rather as a model for how to live. Accordingly, for Kerouac, literature does not belong to a world of art and ideas separated off from real life—rather, it’s the truest expression of a writer’s identity, and it is meaningful when it gives readers a model for structuring their own lives.

Ray and Japhy don’t just read for entertainment—rather, they avidly study literature in an attempt to model their own lives on it. Ray spends much of his time reading religious scriptures, like the Diamond Sūtra and the Bible, and contemplating their teachings and their consequences for his life. When he reads poetry, he approaches it in much the same way: as scripture to study and fully absorb, not just verse to consume and appreciate. This shows that he views literature as a guide to the world, not a distraction from it. Similarly, Japhy spends his days in Berkeley reading and translating Chinese and Japanese poetry. Most notably, he introduces Ray to the Buddhist poet Han Shan, who lived on a remote mountaintop and wrote about the beauty of nature and isolation. But Ray and Japhy don’t just appreciate Han Shan’s writings because they’re beautiful: rather, they use them as a model for their own lives. In fact, at the very end of the book, Ray goes to spend a summer on a remote mountaintop in the Cascade Range. There, he compares himself to Han Shan—which suggests that he has fulfilled his dream of living an ascetic, solitary life. This supports his theory that literature is a guide to life, and indeed, he presents this more directly earlier in the book. When Ray attends a poetry reading in San Francisco, he contrasts the formal, academic view of literature as political art—represented by the critic Rheinhold Cacoethes’s endless monologues about the state of American poetry—with Japhy’s practical, working-class view of literature as a window into life. This makes it clear that Kerouac values authenticity above originality and creativity in literature: he wants to read and write books that will help him immerse himself in the real world of individual experience, not bring him into an alternate world of fantasy.

Because Ray and Japhy view literature as a representation of authentic experience, they also write in order to give expression to their lives and philosophies. From the beginning of the book, Ray specifically admires Japhy for his writing—at the poetry reading where they meet, Ray is struck by Japhy’s clear, direct poems about Native American religion, Buddhist monks, and the American middle class. Throughout the whole book, Japhy writes far more often than Ray does, and he presents his poems as expressions of his love for nature. For instance, just before he ships out for Japan to study Buddhism, he announces to Ray that he wants to write a long poem about the beauty of the Pacific Northwest woods where he grew up. He doesn’t see this poem as a way to explore new ideas, communicate a message to others, or prove his creativity—rather, it’s a kind of testimonial, a way to capture his feelings and beliefs on the page. Ray also spends much of his time writing poetry, especially during and after his trip to visit his family in North Carolina. For instance, before he leaves for the Cascades, he writes a poem about saints because he views himself as a “crazy saint.” These poems are also part of a search for authentic self-expression: he wants to find his voice, describe his reality, and define his identity for himself in the process.

Of course, Ray (Kerouac) is also busy at work writing The Dharma Bums itself during the book’s events: it’s really his stream-of-consciousness journal, an attempt to record his reality as closely and authentically as possible. If “Cold Mountain” is Han Shan’s masterwork because it gives his readers a window into his unique life and mind, then The Dharma Bums is Kerouac’s attempt to capture and preserve his own eccentric view of the world through writing.