Writers are taking a second look at Jack Kerouac's On the Road in light of the fiftieth anniversary of the novel's publication. Lowell, Kerouac's birthplace, has hosted several events and is presenting the original Kerouac scroll. And why not? People named Kerouac's book as an inspiration that liberated them from the daily grind and fed the counterculture movement.

But is Kerouac's famed book all that inspiring? Or is it more inspiring in hindsight, once people have looked back on their decisions and projected their thoughts on his book?

Yes, Kerouac's book is breathtaking and groundbreaking. Kerouac had a gift for describing landscapes, and he could find a distinct personality in each place. Kerouac's protagonist/stand-in Sal Paradise takes a solo trip and finds the beauty in Nebraska as he rides with farmboys and hobos:

"We zoomed through another crossroads town, passed another line of tall lanky men in jeans clustered in the dim light like moths on the desert, and returned to the tremendous darkness, and the stars overhead were pure and bright because of the increasingly thin air as we mounted the high hill of the western plateau, about a foot a mile, so they say, and no trees obstructing any low-leveled stars anywhere. And once I saw a moody whitefaced cow in the sage by the road as we flitted by. It was like riding a railroad train, just as steady and just as straight."

Sal doesn't just see the vastness of America and the splotches of local color - like the cow - dotting the landscape. He feels it and senses hope in everything, from the little details to the grand canvas of the nation. Kerouac proves that if a person ever dismisses a part of America as dull or unworthy, then that person just hasn't been paying attention. More of a human video camera than a character, Sal Paradise keeps his eyes open and absorbs experience after experience.

The United States and, toward the end of the book, Mexico, emerge as the novel's most captivating characters. As a result, Sal and his hobo-mystic idol, Dean Moriarty, fade into the background, like tennis balls bounced back and forth between both coasts.

More after the jump. Image of the edition that was "reconsidered" from Answers.com.

Despite Sal's idolization of Dean, Dean is a character who doesn't age well. It may be bad critical form to think about a literary character as if he is a real person, but Sal's love of Dean is unconvincing. Dean is more of a court jester, plowing his way through the book with his swollen, infected thumb. (Was the thumb bit a comment on too much hitchhiking?)

In one scene, members of Dean's social circle stage an intervention of sorts when he has yet another showdown with one of his many women. Sal watches and declares: "That's what Dean was, the HOLY GOOF."

At that moment, Sal believes in Dean, but, if a reader steps back a little, it might seem that the emphasis is more on "GOOF" rather than "HOLY." It's almost as if Kerouac is looking back on an ex and wondering, "What did I see in that guy?"

Dean and Sal's relationship might be seen as the ultimate in male road-trip bonding, but, in most of their conversations, Dean is doing most of the talking and sucking the air out of scenes. He was modeled on a real person (Neal Cassady), and his charisma cannot be denied, but the book would still be as groundbreaking and moving without his presence. The book is about America, not about Sal, and not about Dean.