Reaching for a Higher State of Existence The Dharma Bums, a book that Kerouac himself once described as a potboiler, is perhaps the most representative expression of the Beat sensibility in a work of fiction. Its focus is the close intellectual and religious relationship of Kerouac and Snyder. Snyder called The Dharma Bums a real statement of synthesis, through Kerouac, of the available models andmyths of freedom in American. Like most of Jack Kerouac’s novels, The Dharma Bumsis an autobiographical fiction in which a particular period in its author’s life is dramatically heightened and given coherent shape. The book focuses on the friendship between its first-person narrator, Raymond Smith (based on Kerouac himself), and Japhy Ryder (based on Gary Snyder), and on the ways in which Japhy inspires Ray to lead a more spiritual, self-sufficient life. The novel begins, however, not with the first meeting between Ray and Japhy, but with a freight train ride from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, during which Ray is delighted to meet a little bum who carries a prayer by Saint Teresa. This tramp, whom Ray takes to be a religious wanderer, is less important in himself than as a precursor of Japhy Ryder, who comes to represent the ultimate “Dharma Bum” in Ray’s rapturous eyes. From their first meeting, Japhy is seen as an exemplary pilgrim who travels the world “to turn the wheel of the True meaning, or Dharma, and gain merit for himself as a future Buddha.” Though Kerouac does not group his thirty-four chapters into sections, the novel does, under close scrutiny, reveal a symmetrical tripartite form. In each of its three parts, Ray moves from stressful encounters in civilization towards epiphanies in nature, epiphanies which he either experiences with or associates with Japhy. In the first section, Ray enjoys certain aspects of his new friendship with Japhy in San Francisco and Berkeley, but it is their trip to the High Sierra that takes him to his first major peak...