This chapter focuses on Kerouac’s epic “Duluoz Legend,” a series of autobiographical books that form the core of his oeuvre. These books include seminal works such as On the Road, Visions of Cody, and The Dharma Bums, and although such books can be read outside the context of the Duluoz Legend, Kerouac saw them as pieces of “one enormous comedy.” This chapter focuses on the Duluoz Legend as a whole, exploring: 1) how the idea of writing a series of autobiographical books “on the run” occurred to Kerouac; 2) how the books comprising the Legend are related; 3) the different literary models for the Legend, with particular attention to the example of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past; 5) the various prose styles in the Legend; and 6) how to read the Legend as a record of both Kerouac’s evolving consciousness and the events of his life.

This chapter explores Kerouac’s rich understanding of literary history as manifested in his Duluoz Legend, focusing in particular on two mechanisms by which this understanding turns up in his work. The first mechanism was his deep desire to seek and speak the truth, as he wrestled with his need to lead a godly life, a product of his Catholic upbringing, while simultaneously recognizing the almost requisite demand that a great novelist experience the darkness of the human soul. The second is the confession, which was not the legal confession of a court room or the spiritual confession of the church, but the broader truth of any human being who follows a path to forgiveness and wholeness by repeatedly purging themselves of sin, guilt, or embarrassment. Kerouac consistently worked truth and confession together – often to the dismay of some readers – twinning and twining them as he grappled with his spiritual and bodily identity as an American writer living in two conflicting Americas, the “the essential and everlasting America” of the ethereal beauty and mysticism, and the post–World War II triumphalist America of materialism and militarization.

This chapter argues that Kerouac’s oeuvre must be reassessed as a unique case of the literary deployment of the archival. “Spontaneous” names the author’s instrument of choice because it serves his goals of leaving a “complete record” behind and becomes the means of (re)capturing the origins – or provenance – of the poetic insight and narrative structure of his innermost memories. Kerouac’s Spontaneous Prose method is thus a technique in the service of the most archival of impulses; the wish to record and preserve all experience for posterity. Spontaneous poetics is where provenance meets recording eye. This thirst for capturing the moment is motivated by Kerouac’s passion for origins – not just regarding his own ancestry and French-Canadianness but, as a writer, he further hopes to record the very inception of all epiphanies, emotions, sensations he experiences. In particular, this chapter examines Visions of Cody, in which his archival sensibility is most evident, showing that the novel both embodies the archival character of Kerouac’s novelistic form while simultaneously serving an archival function of preservation.