Thirty thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean—somewhere between Sydney and Los Angeles—the narrator of “the lonely and the road” doesn’t really know where he is going, or why. His is a quest written spontaneously—‘on-the-go.’ It is a journey of uncertain motivation, of uncertain means, towards uncertain ends. From Los Angeles, to Vegas, to the Rocky Mountain states and beyond, the narrator travels with and learns from his friends, his family and even his ex-girlfriend as he searches for that which continues to elude him. But what is that exactly? Does it even exist? While the novel details a journey, the exegesis is a phenomenological account of the intersecting of my road with that taken by Jack Kerouac. It explores my experiences with the life and work of Kerouac—the creator of spontaneous prose—in relation to the development of my writing, up to and including this novel. In doing so, the exegesis is itself a quest that seeks to understand more fully the essence of Kerouac’s and my own representation of the quest motif in content and in form. Both the exegesis and the novel, then, constitute part of the search for my own artistic road, and aim to assist others in search of theirs.