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While the title implies supreme spontaneity, Kerouac was never quite as deliberately spontaneous as his legend has insisted. His plan was to create a “giant epic in the tradition of Balzac and Proust”, but he never managed to determine a literary technique capable of welding the separate books of his Duluoz chronology into a coherent whole, “even if he tried”. Ann Charters is the voice behind much of the critical discussion of Kerouac's overwhelming legend-making aspiration,

“He couldn't come up with any literary technique to help him fit all the volumes of the Duluoz Legend into one continuous tale. All he could think of was to change the names in the various books back to their original forms, hoping that this single stroke would give sufficient unity to the disparate books, magically making them fit more smoothly into their larger context as the Duluoz (Kerouac the Louse) Legend…[H]e wanted the books reissued in a uniform edition to make the larger design unmistakeable.”

To claim that each individual novel is insufficient without integration into the larger context of the legend assumes a very conventional definition of legend. Not only is it linear and coherently chronological, it is also bound by the rules of time that govern reality. Of course there is no real reason why this should be so. Kerouac's “beats” create permanent and timeless impressions, and unending rhythms like Nature herself- the beat will go on if it is not bound by temporality or rationality, but, like a true legend, circulates and permeates the universal consciousness all the time, for all time. A legend can, after all, be many things: an unauthenticated story from ancient times; an allegorical tale of obvious exaggeration or fallacy; simple fame; an explanation accompanying an image or map- and, in music, a composition capable of relating a story- even without words.

Charters' criticisms fall away rapidly. Kerouac's work easily adheres to each of these versions of the term “legend”, as if he is unconsciously sensitive to the subtle multiplicity of the word, and feels obliged to fulfil the word's promise. His work is carefully designed, indeed, he was preoccupied by the notion of design- the pre-styling of the free-styling- and perhaps not, then, the carefree and careless King of Beats.

The assumption of wild abandon seems to arise from misunderstandings of the term “free prose.” The “free” to which Kerouac refers does not, in any way, signify a relinquishing of control. It is, however, rather like Wordsworth's “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” which creates an impression of experimentation but really represents a highly contrived artifice to contain the exuberance of “natural” speech. Associating Kerouac's particular diction with what he has called, “the unfulfilled linguistic intentions of the British Lake poets,” Tytell asserts that Kerouac sought a diction compatible with the natural and irrepressible flow of any “uncontrollable involuntary thoughts” that he had to release.

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