Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac

A young boy’s imagination is absolutely wild and stormy, and this novel depicts it exactly

pp.207

Published: Harper Perennial, 2006 (1959)

In 1958, Jack Kerouac penned his thirty rules for writing spontaneous prose, which included: Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind; Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition; and Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better. All of his rules encompass his literary mantra – ‘first thought best thought’ – the concept of which is that revision of a manuscript merely serves to obscure the true intended meaning of that very first thought. In the wild and disjointed narrative of Doctor Sax we can see these principles at their poetic best.

The novel follows parts of Kerouac’s youth in such a delineated and hectic fashion as to be like a dream. And indeed, dream and fantasy are employed as techniques by the author in portraying the inner life of the young boy. Whole swathes of the novel are mere fantastical imaginary scenes that have no bearing upon the overall narrative direction. A number of entire chapters are taken up with the exploits of the vampire Count Condu and the strange figure of Doctor Sax, in a weird aside that is the boy populating his childhood with characters and games. This can be irritating at times as their are many instances where the narrative thread is completely lost and the reader left adrift, but the overall sense that this erratic style gives us is that of a rambling, energetic, playful mind.   

The mysterious phantom Doctor Sax is ever-present in this novel which bursts with dark happenings. Sax does a lot of lurking at the periphery of the boy’s imaginings, first seen by us in the woods, ‘stalking with the incredible Jean Fourchette’, and is said to be hiding ‘around the corner of my mind’. Later on, this devastating presence prophesies a flood as he stands ‘on the dark shore, a ledge above the waters’. The flood becomes the crescendo of the book in a section that is highly descriptive and lyrical in its depiction of the catastrophe.

What makes Kerouac’s spontaneous prose style work so well is that he has a natural ability with the written word, so that his hurried sentences are actually very well formed even as they rush onwards with no heed of grammatical accuracy. As is common with most of his novels, the full stop is largely replaced with a hyphen, which tends to send the reader reeling, tumbling through the narrative helplessly and without a life preserver. Reading Kerouac is a real experience. Doctor Sax is an incredible read, particularly to those fans of his who might be surprised by the oddly sinister current running, darkly, through it. A young boy’s imagination is absolutely wild and stormy, and this novel depicts it exactly.