To read "On the Road" but not "Visions of Cody" is to take a nice sightseeing tour but to forgo the spectacular rapids of Jack Kerouac's wildest writing.
He called this new work "Visions of Cody." Kerouac was like a mechanic who had started out to repair a car with spare parts and had ended up building an entirely new vehicle instead.
When Allen Ginsberg first read "Visions of Cody" in manuscript, he wrote Cassady: "Jack's book arrived and it is a holy mess." If Ginsberg, Kerouac's most sympathetic reader, had trouble with the book, at least at first, then it should surprise no one if some other readers stumble on the problems the book presents.
Visions of Cody is a novel by Jack Kerouac, perhaps his most stylistically free and varied.
The first section of the book is essentially a collection of short stream-of-consciousness essays, which Kerouac called "sketches", many simply describing elements of Dulouz's (Kerouac's) post-World War II New York City environment, from the texture and smells of a lunch counter to St.
Some of Visions of Cody is a fast-forward recapitulation of the events described in On the Road, which was also about Kerouac and Cassady.
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