Big Sur

Big Sur (1962), a novel by American author Jack Kerouac, follows the attempt of a successful novelist, Jack Duluoz, to sober up during a short vacation at the Big Sur home of his friend, bookstore-owner, and Beat poet Lorenzo Monsanto. The novel is heavily autobiographical: Duluoz is Kerouac’s alter ego, who struggled with chronic alcoholism, as well as the personal fall-out from his successful and controversial novel, On the Road (1957). Lorenzo Monsanto is a thinly fictionalized Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Several other figures from Kerouac’s life appear, including Neal Cassidy, fictionalized here as Cody Pomeray but best known to readers as On the Road’s Dean Moriarty. Big Sur was adapted into a film of the same title in 2013.

It’s August 1960, and Jack Duluoz has been living hard and fast in San Francisco. Hungover and alone in a hotel room, Jack realizes he has to make a change: “One fast move or I’m gone.” His friend Lorenzo Monsanto has offered him the use of his cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, and he regrets refusing a ride. He catches a bus and then walks—a long, exhausting, but exhilarating walk over the cliffs.

The solitude and the beauty of the natural world have an instant healing effect on Jack. He feeds the local wildlife: mice, birds, and squirrels. He sits above the sea and writes down the words it seems to him the sea is saying (the resulting poem, “Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur,” is appended to the text of the novel). He decides that this kind of life is what he needs now—not the endless drink-sodden parties of his San Francisco routine. Nevertheless, he begins to crave drink and women, and the sound of the sea changes: now it is telling him to go after what he desires.



After three weeks at the cabin, Jack returns to San Francisco. There he learns from Monsanto that his mother has sent news from New York: Jack’s cat has died. The news hits Jack surprisingly hard. In retrospect, Jack the narrator can see that this was the first of several “signposts” pointing towards a serious impending breakdown.

Jack slides back into his old ways, drinking heavily and talking endlessly with his San Francisco gang, made up of the Beat Generation’s deteriorating heroes. There are also a few young hangers-on, wannabe Beats like Ron Blake, who hero-worships Jack. The gang travels around in a jeep nicknamed “Willie,” owned by Dave Wain and his girlfriend, Romana.

Jack asks Dave to take him to Cody Pomeray’s home in Los Gatos. On the drive, Jack and Dave have some time to discuss the way things have changed since the old days. Jack tells Dave that kids turn up on his doorstep expecting to meet the free-wheeling twenty-five-year-old protagonist of his famous novel: they’re disappointed to find a run-down, disappointed, cynical, alcoholic forty-year-old who looks ten years older.



Jack finds Los Gatos frustrating: he can’t get time alone with Cody, to talk the way they used to. Part of the problem is Evelyn, Cody’s wife. The three of them used to have a happy, functioning three-way relationship, but now Jack is excluded. Evelyn tells him she believes that she and Jack will have their chance in another life, and Jack decides to try to believe it too.

The whole gang visits another old friend, George Baso, in a tuberculosis hospital. At this second taste of mortality, Jack’s mental state takes another worrying slide. He leads the gang back to the Big Sur cabin, even though he feels it is a desecration of his experience there to return drunk, and with company.

From the cabin, Cody takes Jack back into San Francisco to meet his mistress. Billie is a slender blonde with a four-year-old son, Elliot. She and Jack hit it off, and Cody leaves them to it. They have sex, and Jack moves in for a week, which he spends sitting in a chair and drinking hard. His friends visit and try to get him to eat something, but he refuses, and his mental state begins to collapse.



Billie suggests marriage. Jack refuses, claiming to be incapable of commitment. Billie threatens to kill herself and Elliott. Jack offers to bring Billie, together with Dave and Romana, out to the cabin in Big Sur. On his return to the cabin, the long-awaited breakdown finally occurs. He begins to suffer uncontrollable delirium tremens and endures a terrifying night of paranoid hallucinations and incendiary spiritual visions.

After dawn, Jack sleeps, and when he wakes, he feels restored, even uplifted. He decides that everything is going to be okay after all. His plan is to go to New York, to see his mother and his cat’s grave: “There’s no need to say another word.”

Big Sur explores themes of mortality, age, and addiction, painting a portrait of a man who has outlived his own legend.