The Day After Superman Died
This is the fictionalised account by Kesey of the death of Beatnik legend Neal Cassady’s death, down in Mexico. It is somewhat comical, although evocative of strong sadness to many readers, for it portrays Neal Cassady in a way that really shows why is considered so heroic in the eyes of most Beatniks. As he dies, he mutters the number of ties he counted, when walking along a railroad somewhere, an odd final thought, but one that explains the very nature of what the Beatific movement saw themselves as.
His thoughts show difficulty, for having to walk a railroad is not a pleasant thing. It is the burden of the poor to walk such distances. The poverty of the Beatniks has often been romanticised, even by Kerouac himself, who stated that everything belonged to him because he was poor. But, it still shows how incompatible they were with the American System. They were all potent authors, Neal was supposedly a tremendous driver, entertaining presence, and had the sheer stamina to maintain normal and healthy relationships with his current wife, future wife, and another girl of his fancy, all at the same time. Normally, these people would have seen tremendous success in their lives, but they lived on poor and hardly published; struggling to make ends meet. They had to walk the railroad tracks, but the insights they made on them showed a kind of mental acuity which very few of the American greats can claim for themselves. And yet, despite all that they had going for them, they continued to barely scrape by. This is clearly evocative of America’s determination to end their rebelliousness. They were never going to be accepted, they could never get jobs or popularity in the literary world, so they perished poor, and sometimes in Mexico as they avoided criminal charges, or sometimes even in insane asylums. Neil Cassady, like so many others, died from drug overdose because of the stress in his life because he wanted to change the American System.
His thoughts show difficulty, for having to walk a railroad is not a pleasant thing. It is the burden of the poor to walk such distances. The poverty of the Beatniks has often been romanticised, even by Kerouac himself, who stated that everything belonged to him because he was poor. But, it still shows how incompatible they were with the American System. They were all potent authors, Neal was supposedly a tremendous driver, entertaining presence, and had the sheer stamina to maintain normal and healthy relationships with his current wife, future wife, and another girl of his fancy, all at the same time. Normally, these people would have seen tremendous success in their lives, but they lived on poor and hardly published; struggling to make ends meet. They had to walk the railroad tracks, but the insights they made on them showed a kind of mental acuity which very few of the American greats can claim for themselves. And yet, despite all that they had going for them, they continued to barely scrape by. This is clearly evocative of America’s determination to end their rebelliousness. They were never going to be accepted, they could never get jobs or popularity in the literary world, so they perished poor, and sometimes in Mexico as they avoided criminal charges, or sometimes even in insane asylums. Neil Cassady, like so many others, died from drug overdose because of the stress in his life because he wanted to change the American System.