Themes and Literary Style
Like nearly all of Kerouac's works, Visions of Cody involves a "mythologizing" of his life, here as "Jack Duluoz", renaming characters and imposing grander themes on actual events while rapturously describing the mundane around him. It is also heavily focused on his perception of and relationship to Neal Cassady, renamed "Cody Pomeray." According to Kerouac, the book represented a vertical metaphysical study of Cassady as a character and its relationship to the general America. Continuing to experiment with the spontaneous prose method he had outlined in 1950, he aimed to find "the wild form that can grow with my wild heart". The tape recorder transcriptions injects the presence of speech into the text. The style has been described as New Journalism fifteen years early. There are several meta passages in the book in which Kerouac in the words of Allen Ginsberg "writes about writing", at one point in French. Donald Allen states that the book seems self-consciously unfinished in order to convey 'an undisturbed flow from the mind of personal secret idea words'.
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