San Francisco
In a book title Big Sur, one might naturally expect at least some of the story might be set in San Francisco. And, in fact, one would be right. But the San Francisco usually conveyed in literature that brings the glorious of the beautiful city to life is not necessarily the one being conveyed at all times:
“I’ve noticed it before in San Francisco a kind of ephemeral hysteri that hides in the air over the rooftops among the certain circles there leading always to suicide and maim…It reminds me in fact of a nightmare”
You Meet So Many Interesting People
The narrator remarks that hitchhiking isn’t what it used to be. Not only it is harder to catch a lift, but what waits inside…another nightmare:
“The husband is in the driver’s seat with a long ridiculous vacationist hat with a long baseball visor making him look witless and idiot. Beside him sits wifey, the boss of America”
Darkness
Kerouac seems to be one of the few mid-century writers attuned to the rise of “darkness” as the controlling metaphor of 20th century fiction. So aware of its growing predominance, in fact, that he seems to have especially created a character simply for the point of satirizing the concept:
“McLear whose poetry is really like a black hawk, he’s always writing about darkness, dark brown, dark bedrooms, moving curtains, chemical fire dark pillows, love in chemical fiery red darkness”
When Willamine Talks
Willamine is not a major character, but she earns the honor of one of the most memorable metaphor-rich passages of descriptive prose. The imagery with which the narrator conveys the experience of being with her rings both true and poetic:
“She talks with a broken heart - Her voice lutes brokenly like a heart lost, musically too, like in a lost grove, it's almost too much to bear sometimes like some fantastic futuristic Jerry Southern singer in a nightclub who steps up to the mike in the spotlight in Las Vegas but doesn't even have to sing, just talk, to make men sigh and women wonder”
Billie and the Bard
Billie, by contrast, is a major character even though she doesn’t really enter the narrative until halfway through. At one crucial point, the narrator constructs her character through an allusive metaphor tracing back to one of Shakespeare’s most famous tragic women:
“She looks so sad down there wandering Ophelialike in bare feet among thunders.”
