This paper seeks to redefine the autobiographical implications of allusions to Herman Melville in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) by analyzing the author’s alterations to the novel’s original 1951 scroll manuscripts. In a letter to his former mentor Elbert Lenrow dated on 28 June 1949, Kerouac noted, “Meanwhile, I’m making On the Road a kind of Melvillean thing, in spite of myself.” Kerouac’s alter-ego, Sal Paradise, calls his bohemian friend Dean Moriarty“ that mad Ahab at the wheel” during their return journey from San Francisco to New York. Interestingly, this suggestive allusion to Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) does not appear in the original manuscripts. Meanwhile, Kerouac eliminated an overt allusion to Melville from the opening chapter of On the Road by striking out the original reference to the name of Ishmael, narrator of Moby-Dick. By so doing, Kerouac obscured the Melvillean overtones charged in his literary self-portrait as a son of his mother. In Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation, and America (1979), Dennis McNally places special emphasis on 25-year-old Kerouac’s“ extraordinary dependence on his mother” who provided domestic support while leaving her son free to write his fictions. Kerouac’s identification of Dean as “that mad Ahab” and elimination of allusion to Ishmael from Sal’s self-portrayal would suggest a subtle shift in the author’s perspective on the possibility and condition of On the Road as a new form of American spiritual autobiography.

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