The character Japhy drives Ray Smith's story, whose penchant for simplicity and Zen Buddhism influenced Kerouac on the eve of the sudden and unpredicted success of "On the Road". The action shifts between the events of Smith and Ryder's "city life," such as three-day parties and enactments of the Buddhist "Yab-Yum" rituals, to the sublime and peaceful imagery where Kerouac seeks a type of transcendence. The novel concludes with a change in narrative style, with Kerouac working alone as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak (adjacent to Hozomeen Mountain), in what would soon be declared North Cascades National Park (see also Kerouac's novel "Desolation Angels"). His summer on Desolation Peak was desperately lonely. “Many's the time I thought I'd die of boredom or jump off the mountain,” he wrote in "Desolation Angels". Yet in "The" "Dharma Bums", Kerouac described the experience in elegiac prose.