Self-discovery in Desolation Angels Stripped to its most essential elements, Jack Kerouac's novel Desolation Angels reads like a drug-induced stupor of casual sex (or its fantasies) , mixed in a fusion of jazz and poetry. The often adolescent impulses of Kerouac's character Jack Duluoz, however, are mere episodes from the frenetic, write-it-as-you-think-it phase of pre-literary stardom in the life of a man who essentially founded the Beat. generation. While the overflowing stream of consciousness that comprises this book undoubtedly seems spontaneous, Desolation Angels actually examines, in the most direct and clearly organized manner, the state of human loneliness. Darting from a mountaintop outpost of the Forest Service to San Francisco, from Tangier to London, and slipping from solitude to jazz clubs full of "cats," from the room of a morphine addict to the house of his French-Canadian mother who knits, the angels of desolation face different forms, which incessantly follow Duluoz/Kerouac. The novel begins when Duluoz/Kerouac climbs Desolation Peak on Starvation Ridge in the High Cascades for a seventy-day job as a forest fire lookout. He initially happily anticipates the idea of ​​an isolation that will allow him to reflect "on the meaning of all this existence and suffering and go back and forth in vain" without the distractions of friends, drugs or alcohol. Yet as the days dissolve into each other endlessly, he begins to tire of the monotony of the Desolation. The absolute emptiness that greets him from his point of view reflects the emptiness of life as he sees it. Titled “Desolation in Solitude,” this chapter records his thought patterns as he despairs of the “Void,” an uncertain entity symbolizing an eternal, vast, and indifferent force of… middle of paper… r eternal devotion in the towards him, and this seems to partly explain the source of his anger. He mourns the fact that a healthy, pure creature like her will inevitably grow old and die without leaving a mark on anyone except himself and his sister. Yet in accepting his mortality, he, for the first time in the book, finds a broad sense of peace. Throughout his early journeys and travels, he sought serenity, only to be followed by Desolation. Here, finally, taking a bus across the country with "Memere", strong but innocent, leaves them behind. In witnessing this change, the reader understands that constant movement cannot affect the sense of place, as Duluoz/Kerouac had thought throughout his book. transient excursions. Only addressing our relationships with those we truly love can answer our questions about who we are in this confusing world.