Sunday, March 3, 2019

3rd sentence of the 3rd book



The 3rd book on my Kerouac bookshelf is On The Road: The Original Scroll by Jack Kerouac (Penguin Books, 2007), and the 3rd sentence (in honor of today being the 3rd day of the month) is:
Prior to that I'd always dreamed of going west, seeing the country, always vaguely planning and never specifically taking off and so on. (p. 109)
Two points. First, I am treating the two phrases around the 3-period ellipsis at the beginning of the first paragraph as one sentence, since proper grammar would indicate that if one wanted a full stop between two sentences there would be 4 periods. Kerouac's use of punctuation will continue to stymie us throughout this project, I fear. Second, this is not the 3rd sentence in the entire book -- as I said at the outset of this project (yesterday) I am not counting prefatory material and will focus on the authorial content (in this case, Kerouac's scroll edition of On The Road).

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