kerouac's characters

nadija86 wrote:
 > Hi !
 > I'd like to know the real characters'names of the book "Orpheus
 > Emerged" written on 1945 with the name "john Kerouac" .
 > thanx a lot
 > Nadija86

Kerouac is obviously "Paul", and "Leo" is apparently Allen Ginsberg.
Though this is another bout of Kerouac bashing by some low-life
bastard, it describes some of the characterizations pretty well:

"...Like much of Kerouac's fiction, Orpheus Emerged is almost wholly
autobiographical. The novel takes place on the fringes of an unnamed
urban college campus, a place that Kerouac came to know well after he
dropped out of Columbia University. The story's plot-such as it
is-chronicles Paul (Kerouac's stand-in), Leo (Allen Ginsberg), and
their circle of collegiate friends as they exchange low-level thoughts
on highbrow topics. Kerouac has his characters banter about
Shostakovich, Goethe, and Nietzsche seemingly only to display the
author's familiarity with such august names. Orpheus Emerged opens with
a painful scene with Paul, who attends classes despite being
unenrolled, upstaging a professor. Dwarfed by Paul's scintillating
intellect, the flustered professor throws Paul out of the class. The
book was written in 1945, thankfully, so readers aren't forced to
endure the slang that would arrive shortly: All Paul wanted was an
education, dig? But that professor cat was so square, he couldn't even
pretend he was hip.

Kerouac expends some effort to develop Orpheus Emerged's women
characters rather than reduce them to semen receptacles, as he would in
On the Road. The women don't engage with the men as equals, but they do
possess thoughts of their own. Yet even Kerouac's sentient female
characters can't salvage the pretension personified that is Orpheus
Emerged. The book's symbolism becomes almost unbearably heavy-handed.
"Look at me," Orpheus Emerged seems to say, "I'm a truly important
book." Despite seeming to drag on unceasingly even though it's only
novella-length, the book ends abruptly-a rare, unfortunate
combination..."<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->