Previous
Cody Pomeray
Rosie is a neurotic but talented writer who is dating Cody Pomeray and kills herself during a psychotic fit, just before Ray leaves San Francisco for North Carolina. She is terrified about the police, cuts her wrists on the building’s roof, and then jumps off when the police come to try and help her. Ray continues to think about her after her death, and she comes to represent the miserable and morally deficient U.S., which Ray and his Buddhist buddies are trying to flee. But she also represents Kerouac and his friends’ misogyny and troubled relationships with women. Her real name is Natalie Jackson, and she really did date Neal Cassidy (Cody Pomeray) and die on November 30, 1955. However, Kerouac does not fully explore Rosie’s character beyond her relationship with Cody or the real circumstances of her death, which was never truly confirmed as a suicide (rather than an accident). In real life, Natalie was frightened of the police because she and Neal had robbed $10,000 from Neal’s wife, Carolyn, and lost all the money betting on horses.
Rosie Buchanan Quotes in The Dharma Bums
The The Dharma Bums quotes below are all either spoken by Rosie Buchanan or refer to Rosie Buchanan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 19
Quotes
Then suddenly one night after supper as I was pacing in the cold windy darkness of the yard I felt tremendously depressed and threw myself right on the ground and cried “I'm gonna die!” because there was nothing else to do in the cold loneliness of this harsh inhospitable earth, and instantly the tender bliss of enlightenment was like milk in my eyelids and I was warm. And I realized that this was the truth Rosie knew now, and all the dead, my dead father and dead brother and dead uncles and cousins and aunts, the truth that is realizable in a dead man's bones and is beyond the Tree of Buddha as well as the Cross of Jesus. Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live. I knew this!
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Dharma Bums LitChart as a printable PDF.
Rosie Buchanan Quotes in The Dharma Bums
The The Dharma Bums quotes below are all either spoken by Rosie Buchanan or refer to Rosie Buchanan. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 19
Quotes
Then suddenly one night after supper as I was pacing in the cold windy darkness of the yard I felt tremendously depressed and threw myself right on the ground and cried “I'm gonna die!” because there was nothing else to do in the cold loneliness of this harsh inhospitable earth, and instantly the tender bliss of enlightenment was like milk in my eyelids and I was warm. And I realized that this was the truth Rosie knew now, and all the dead, my dead father and dead brother and dead uncles and cousins and aunts, the truth that is realizable in a dead man's bones and is beyond the Tree of Buddha as well as the Cross of Jesus. Believe that the world is an ethereal flower, and ye live. I knew this!
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
