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6. On the Road
"Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues. You can tell by the way she smiles."
-Bob Dylan
Despite the fact that it is riddled with adventure, humor, beautiful and fantastical descriptions of the American frontier, On the Road is an incredibly depressing novel. I mentioned in my midterm blog post that there are vast similarities among Kerouac's group of ragtags and Hemingway's expatriates in The Sun Also Rises. The roadies that make up On The Road come from a similarly haunting and traumatizing era in American history. This was a generation wedged between the Great Depression and the Second World War, and at the dawning of immense civil rights issues around the country. It seemed that there was nothing pure left, that all was hopeless and withering. Thus, Sal and Dean hop into a car or a train or a bus to try and escape the inevitable mortality.
I discussed in my blog post how when they travelled to Mexico, they were exuberated by the exotic peasant culture. Both of them really thought that Mexico had something special about it, and that their interactions with the natives proved that there was still some vestige of autheniticty left in the world.Yet, their ignorance of Mexican culture and their naivete proves that their trip to Mexico was not any sort of real catharsis.
"We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic.”( 247) This romanticized account of a country they barely know is indicative of their delusion. Mexico is like a dream. They live in a fantasy world, this place free of the restrictions of American life. We talked in class about how trauma can lead to a layer of depersonalization- part of Depersonalization Disorder is the feeling that one is living in a dream or a movie. When real life has disturbing effects, the disturbed party often escapes into a fantasy world, observing everything as if they are living in a fuzzy dreamworld. I think that Sal and Dean's dillusionment with Mexico comes from their desperation- their extreme unhappiness with the structured and depressing lifestyle in America that they want to find something magical. Yet, escapism only goes so far. By the end of the trip, Sal realizes that the women in Mexico are painted and artificial, that they did not escape death in Mexico. Rather, Sal got sick and was abandoned by Dean( supposedly his best friend). The pipe dream was over.
- labellavita's blog
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Traveling in Your Own Country
A different kind of tourism and me ranting
Sal hopes to get down to the nitty gritty of the States. He wants to experience the real and authentic rather than the touristy world that is often created. When in Cheyenne, the boys hope to see some real western tradition and instead find themselves submersed in the "absurd devices it had fallen to keep its proud tradition" (33). Random thought: I can't help but wonder why they want the authentic places and the authentic travel experience so badly but don't mind experiencing these inauthentic emotions and nights with girls they don't know. Is the false closeness of the girls inauthentic or do they consider the experience of being with prostitutes in the whorehouse in Mexico a genuine experience? Let's ponder that later...
Is there a difference between traveling in your own country for the first time vs. traveling in another country? The themes are the same: the search for the authentic, the desire to lose oneself in his surroundings, the hope of finding oneself as well. Although the language barrier isn't a problem, they still come across scorn from people in other states much like tourists do in other countries though how much of that scorn is from them being from another area of from them being drunk and high is hard to know. Which leads me to my next quandary.
Why do we care so much about this book and the characters? To me they are incredible self absorbed with no real likable characteristics. Maybe we all secretly wish that we could flee the world that we live in and get rid of any burden while driving cross country with friends. In theory this sounds delightful even for a prude like me, but I cannot get on board with feeling anything but disgust for how the boys behave themselves. They are constantly getting high and drunk, picking up girls and then letting them go, having babies and then forgetting about them, the list goes on and on. And yet this book is popular. I personally don't enjoy watching or reading about someone's life going down the drain in the way Dean's does. And I can't stand how they treat women. In Mexico they are admiring Victor's young baby and they "all wished we had a little son like that" (286). Hello!!! Dean! You have kids and have neglected them. So rather than starring at someone else's children, leave the drugs and your buddies and go home.
With any luck, the next book we read won't be so painful. Sorry Kerouac, you're not for me.
Freedom of the Road
A look at the unique freedoms of "road trip" traveling
I bring this theme up after reading Kerouac because in this novel the theme of the “time to move on” is very stressed. Throughout Sal’s journey West he is constantly stopping along the way. However, Sal ends each one of these stops by saying, “the time was coming for me to leave.” It is clear that while traveling there is a definite amount of appropriate time for each stop, then its time to go.
Interestingly, in this road trip, this definite amount of time revolves around convenience. Sal stays in a place until things begin to go sour. He stays in Denver until he screws thing up with a girl and feels like the city is one big hangover. He stays in San Francisco until as he says in ‘Sal style’, “The time was coming for me to leave Frisco or I’d go crazy.” This seems to be the magic of the road trip: you stay until you want to go, and then you just go.
However, in order to just go you need to have some sort of destination. The destination is crucial; Sal can say oh time to move on from this soured placed (Denver for example) only because he has a place and a goal to move on to (San Fran). Sal can then only leave San Fran because he plans to meet up with the crew in Texas. In this way, the “freedom” of the road trip is counter-intuitively derived from always having a goal and destination.
This concept brings up a question about the potential negative effects of this travel cycle. If you are constantly looking ahead you may not enjoy the present. This is clear in Sal’s journey: by all rights Sal should have loved to stay in Denver with his crew, but because he had San Fran in his sights he didn’t give it a full chance, instead he moved on. However, on the flip side, constantly having the a place to go allows certain freedoms: Sal might not of had the confidence or courage to sleep with the girl in Denver if he hadn’t known he could escape the next day.
I am not sure if all of these themes are applicable to all other types of travels and journeys. However, these themes certainly seems to characterize road trips of the time, where you had the freedom to just stick your thumb out and escape toward your next destination.
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Nothing Like That Good Old Apple Pie
What is the authentic American experience?
Reality
The truth behind Sal's journey
Through his hardships on the road, it’s clear that Sal didn’t take the typical trip a recreational tourist would take. Instead, he journeyed on an experimental one; he often encountered the struggles of living at that time period. After meeting his short-time lover, Terry, the two worked together to help take care of themselves and Terry’s son. To do this, they worked 14-hour days picking cotton and living in a tent.
All in all, though Sal doesn’t embark on an existential journey, he does embark on an experimental one, moving from place to place after having spent sufficient time at each one. He “engages in the authentic life, but refuses to fully commit himself to it; rather, he samples and compares the different alternatives” (Cohen). He experienced life all over America, and at the end, he truly believed himself to be “a man of the earth.”
Travellers vs. Tourists
On the Road in America and Mexico
One specific example is right after they leave Bull’s house for Texas and they find themselves lost in the swamps of Louisiana. Almost instantaneously they are transferred to another world, “We wanted to get out of this mansion of the snake, this mireful drooping dark, and zoom on back to familiar American ground and cowtowns.” What’s interesting about this passage is that this is one of the first times that Dean and Sal actually feel like they are foreigners, which is interesting because they are not really too far from Bull’s house. Obviously there is a racial component to their discomfort with their surroundings, but after all of their travel from coast to coast across the American heartland, they are used to the “familiar American ground” that they have encountered so many times and although they are sometimes perceived as tourists in the areas that they visit because of their beat clothes and general wildness, they still manage to seem comfortable with their surroundings.
When they finally make it to the jungles of Mexico, Sal experiences the same feeling of foreignness when he sees the “strange Mexicans in tattered rags” and the “strange young girls, dark as the moon”, but instead of being scared of the foreigners, as he and Dean were before, Dean seems to have finally found “people like himself”. The interesting difference between these two scenarios is that the reason why they feel more comfortable here is because like Port, they are in search of “the essential strain of the basic primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial belly of the world”. In many ways it seems like On the Road is similar to The Sheltering Sky in that there is a focus on personal development, but different because the time frame in which this story happens is so stretched out.
Misfit
Sal and Dean just don’t fit in.
Dean is frequently described as a maniac. His actions surprise and confuse most people so he gets written off as crazy. People find it hard to get along with him. Sal, on the other hand is much quieter than Dean and often takes the role of observer. He begins the book in search or his beautiful idea of “The West.” Every time he reaches a place that is westward of New York he thinks that his dream is going to come to life, but he is only disappointed. Even when he reaches San Francisco, as far west as he can go, he doesn’t find what he is looking for and remains depressed. All these disappointments force Sal and Dean to feel they must move on to a new place. They don’t realize that they are happiest when they are actually in the process of moving from one place to another.
Ultimately this causes Dean and Sal to become a pair. They yearn to move together. Sal and Dean’s constant movement allows them to only be judged briefly. When the two of the (and Marylou) are in the car naked, truck drivers only have time to give them strange looks but the pair don’t have to suffer the consequences of doing something socially unacceptable by society.
It is fairly well knows that the story and characters of On the Road are based on travels and people from Jack Kerouac’s own life (On the Road Again). I believe that much of the first half (at least) of this novel aims to explain the effort of young adults to “find themselves.” Almost all human beings go through a period of “not fitting in” and Kerouac is trying to give this feeling a universal story.
The Itch
The Desire To Travel Within All of Us
What is it that gives people the itch? I know I’ve felt it before myself, and I’m sure a majority of the rest of the population has as well. I live a comfortable life, similar to Sal, and I don’t have a shifty past, like Dean, that makes me want to stay on the run. And in the end, part of me knows I will want to come back home as Sal does after his stint in San Francisco and with Terry. Sal and I are living decades apart, yet the feeling is the same.
I believe that the desire a person has to explore the world around them correlates to the fervor a person has for life. It is rare that a person will happily accept the life that has been laid out for them without questioning the other possibilities that are out there. It could be that a person, such as Sal, is quite content with the idea of getting married and settling down, yet he still has the itch. Lying in a hotel room in Denver with Rita, Sal “put[s] [his] hand over her mouth and [tells] her not to yawn. [He] tried to tell her how excited [he] was about life and the things we could do…”(pg. 55). Sal has such a desire to live as many different ways as he can before he commits himself to one way of living for the rest of his life.
I don’t know if this is true for everyone, but Sal’s travels sound exciting and even appealing. Despite the fact that he almost never has money and often ends up sleeping on benches, he has the most wonderful stories to tell and meets the most interesting people. And as I read, the little voice within me that is telling me to leave everything behind and run away gets a little louder.
Kerouac's Traveling Truth
The incorporation of fact into stories of travel
In reading Sante’s review of On the Road, I was startled to find that Kerouac amped up his nonfiction sentences to fit better into the novel. The profound quotation above is very relatable and well written to me. However, in the book, the author adds flowery vocabulary such as “fabulous” which seems unnecessary. I understand that he aimed to make the story more comprehensible for the reader but in this attempt I fear that Kerouac lost some of the authenticity he originally had in his work. The writing style in the first draft was straightforward and I believe this primary writing better represents the author and his experiences. Since the story is basically all fact and true accounts of Kerouac’s own travels, it only makes sense that his writing should reflect that. I agree with Sante that although the edited version was appropriate for the mid 1900’s, the original scroll is the real piece of literature that will last throughout time.
Kerouac, Hemingway and Bowles all overtly imposed aspects of their own lives into their writing. Each of these authors made the profession of their main character or narrator some sort of writer. Being that this is what each of these men know well, they are clearly reflecting themselves into the characters. These authors also incorporate their entire lives into their works, as seen in the road trips by Sal in On the Road and the African travels of Port in The Sheltering Sky. Travel stories, it seems, are best told through nonfiction accounts. It is difficult to make up a story of travel, with all of the intimacies and abnormalities one experiences, when the author himself has never partaken in the journey. For this reason, these authors’ stories are authentic, only subtly skewed, memories of actual people. I find, as a reader, that I enjoy an interesting true story much more than an interesting made up story. To know that the authors have dropped everything to travel across the country or took leisure trips to remote parts of the world procures in me a sense of respect for them. A travel story by nature is meant to transport the reader to the time and place in which it takes place; it is meant to make the reader feel as though they are taking the journey too. Kerouac’s inclusion of so many familiar characters and his way of describing his surroundings accomplishes this. I not only enjoyed On the Road because it is entertaining, but also because it is basically fact.
Into the Road
Traveling without an itinerary
As described by Cohen in A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences, there are numerous ways in which a single person or a group of people can travel. Although Cohen discussed the philosophy behind tourism, he neglected to discuss the concrete details of travel, such as backpacking vs. staying in a hotel, traveling without direction vs. an itinerary.
In On the Road, Sal Paradise embarks on the former style of adventure, leaving most of his belongings at home and embarking on a journey without plans, schedules or agenda. His main form of transportation is hitchhiking, an outdated novelty in today’s society, but a common occurrence in the 1950’s. The only “planned” aspect of his voyage is the destination: West, specifically, Denver. Both Sal and Dean have an obsession with intellectualism. They enjoy philosophy and writing, and these passions are most likely the catalyst for such an ambiguous journey. Sal seeks inspiration for a novel he is in the middle of writing.
This narrative lacks a typical plotline: details building up to an inevitable climax and then watching the storyline wane. But what it lacks in plot, it gains in its vibrant descriptions of character. One way to look at it is that the characters Sal encounters are the plot: Montana Gene, Mississippi Slim and the various others that offer him rides create the plotline by sharing their own stories in each chapter.
When reading, a habit of mine is to compare literature or film with other bodies of work. Christopher McCandless’ journey in Into the Wild seems as if it were derived from Kerouac’s cult classic, and the beat generation in general. Like Paradise, McCandless goes in search of inspiration in a life full of predictability and consistency. McCandless’ journey starts much later in the 1900’s than Paradise’s, but both bear striking similarities. Both McCandless and Paradise get to and from locations by hitchhiking or public transportation. Their stories are also developed by the characters they meet while “on the road”. McCandless, however, starts out with everything going for him: wealth, education, guaranteed success, and throws it out the window, whereas Paradise doesn’t start out with much. I’m exited to continue reading this novel and am anticipating many more connection between the two.
Going Just To Go
Sal's confusing reasons for being on the road
However, is this really Sal’s mission in traveling? We don’t know for sure, but I have a few ideas. First being that he was just bored, and is traveling recreationally. He is a writer (like almost all of our traveling characters have been) and is kind of sick of the daily grind of New York life, and needs to get away. He does what everyone tries to do—get as far away as possible (within reach), which for him means hitchhiking to the other side of the country. There doesn’t seem to be much depth to his reason to traveling if you only look at it at this level.
More depth can be found if you look deeper into his actions. Perhaps Sal is a diversionary tourist, who feels deeply dissatisfied with his life in New York, and because of his recent breakup, is just looking for things to distract him. This would make sense and explain some of his impulsive actions: he is just trying to do anything he can to escape, and not feel the pain he felt when his wife left him.
A slightly less optimistic view of Sal is that he is just following the bandwagon. There is a part where he even says that the reason he left was because its what everyone was doing, so he figured it was what he should do as well. This type of tourist was left off of Cohen’s list of tourists, and for good reason. This is the worst type of tourist, and the worst type of person—a follower. It doesn’t matter what your reasons are for leaving, as long as they are your reasons.
A final explanation for why Sal travels is that he isn't "going to get somewhere", he is "just going". This explanation fits perfectly with his impulsivity and immaturity, but is a little shallow: usually people say they're going "just to go", but in reality there is more behind it.
Perhaps the only right explanation is that Sal is a mix of types. There is no one word that can describe him or why he travels, and I also think we aren’t supposed to fully understand the reasons for his traveling, possibly until the end of the book, possibly never. But reading the book will give us a better idea on why Sal truly decided to hit the road.
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Why Be On the Road?
Random thoughts and reflections...
Reading On the Road spoke to me on a personal level. What would my answer be to the question above? The novel had a lot to do with what I’ve been contemplating about myself—on how I wanted to live. I am mainly torn between the two paths. On one side, I could just go through life as how I believed I was expected to, being a good, responsible citizen, working in a profession that I enjoy etc. On the other path, a path perhaps more obscure and mysterious but much more exciting, I could live from moment to moment, in the Eternal Now, going with the flow, sort of like the characters in the novel. Surprisingly, I could relate to the Beat Movement like the mass of youth influenced by the Beat Generation, a term coined by the author Jack Kerouac himself, “members of the generation that came of age after WWII, who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold War, espouse mystical detachment and relaxation of social and sexual tensions.”
Sal Paradise claims he goes off on the road because as a young writer, he wants life experiences, see a new horizon, and receive that pearl. He simply takes off with “[his] canvas bag in which a few fundamental things were packed,” with no concrete plans in mind. In the beginning he had “the stupid hearthside idea it would be wonderful to follow one great red line across America instead of trying various roads and routes.” (I wonder what life would be like if there indeed was one great red line that we were supposed to follow)Taking buses and hitchhiking, he heads to the west. I felt Sal was traveling in a diversionary mode because he is away for the centre and goes on the road primarily to escape from life that he is lost in and free from identity, commitment, and responsibility. Not in touch with the American centre, he travels in spontaneity and impulse, seeking new, wild, authentic experiences.
Is Sal Paradise trying to get to a certain destination or just be on the road? Is his message that the road to the destination, not solely the destination itself, is important???
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Traveling the American Way
Sal as a traveler and how he experiences the 5 different modes of travel.
I think that On the Road by Jack Kerouac is a novel that differs greatly from the other novels that we have read so far this semester. The biggest way that this novel differs is the main characters never leave America. Unlike in previous novels which have taken place in Europe or in Africa and have had main characters travelling from America, this novel is focused on Americans travelling within America which makes it unique in this respect. By focusing the novel in America, Kerouac shows how travelers can get the sense of travel even if they remain in their own country. Throughout the book, there are two main topics that I think are essential to discuss, the first of which being whether the characters that I have encountered so far are tourists or travelers and the second is which form of travel these main characters travel by throughout the novel.
The first theme I think that is important to discuss is whether or not Sal, Dean, Carlo and the other characters are really travelers or tourists. Throughout the novel there is significant evidence that points to the main characters being travelers. Whether it’s Sal describing his journey from NYC to the Midwest or him and his friends journeys throughout Colorado traveling from bar to bar and interacting with the locals or in San Francisco where Sal gets a job at a barracks with his friend Remi, the main characters in the novel and especially Sal can be looked it as travelers. Kerouac writes, “Then came spring, the great time of traveling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting ready to take one trip or another” (6). The main characters aren’t traveling just to say they did it and they certainly aren’t just visiting the stereotypical tourists hangouts when they travel to these places either. They are traveling for an authentic experience. Sal interacts with the locals in Nebraska, Denver etc. and hitchhikes numerous times to get from the East coast to the West coast. This is not something a tourist does. Sal hardly ever stays in hotels like the other characters in the previous novels. Instead, he stays with friends, like in San Francisco when he stayed with Remi in his wife in a shack which shows how he is indeed a traveler and not a tourist.
The theme of reasons for travel and the type of traveler that Sal in particular is also important to discuss. Numerous times throughout the novel, there is conflicting evidence on why Sal really travels. He can resemble a recreational tourist, a diversionary tourist, an experiential tourist, an experimental tourist and even an existentialist tourist. He displays a recreational mode of travel when being described by his aunt. Kerouac says, “My aunt was all in accord with my trip to the West; she said it would do me good, I’d been working so hard all winter and staying in too much” (9). Here, Sal resembles a recreational tourist who needs a break and wants to travel for rejuvenation. Sal also resembles traveling with a diversionary mode of travel when Kerouac states, “For a moment it was no different from being in Newark, except for the great hugeness outside that I loved so much” (34). It can also be argued that he traveled to the West to distract himself from the mundane lifestyle back in NYC.
Sal also shows off an experiential style to travel when he is described as saying, “I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang..” (35). He is using an image of his friends enjoying themselves in Denver to fuel his desire to travel there. The reader is exposed to an experimental side to Sal as well. He goes from NYC, to the Midwest, to Colorado and then to San Francisco. Sal seems to be on a search for a new centre and travels from place to place in search of one. Kerouac describes this when he describes Sal as saying, “I was itching to get on to San Francisco” (56). Finally we see the final mode of travel that Sal certainly exemplifies. Kerouac states, “I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was” (15). Sal may be using his trip to the West Coast in search of a completely new centre. He is going to the West Coast with his set of East Coast values maybe in search of completely changing his life and starting brand new. Throughout the novel, he shows no signs of wanting to return home right away which leaves open this possibility as well. This helps show how Sal goes through all the modes of travel which is what makes this novel even more special to read in my opinion.
The first theme I think that is important to discuss is whether or not Sal, Dean, Carlo and the other characters are really travelers or tourists. Throughout the novel there is significant evidence that points to the main characters being travelers. Whether it’s Sal describing his journey from NYC to the Midwest or him and his friends journeys throughout Colorado traveling from bar to bar and interacting with the locals or in San Francisco where Sal gets a job at a barracks with his friend Remi, the main characters in the novel and especially Sal can be looked it as travelers. Kerouac writes, “Then came spring, the great time of traveling, and everybody in the scattered gang was getting ready to take one trip or another” (6). The main characters aren’t traveling just to say they did it and they certainly aren’t just visiting the stereotypical tourists hangouts when they travel to these places either. They are traveling for an authentic experience. Sal interacts with the locals in Nebraska, Denver etc. and hitchhikes numerous times to get from the East coast to the West coast. This is not something a tourist does. Sal hardly ever stays in hotels like the other characters in the previous novels. Instead, he stays with friends, like in San Francisco when he stayed with Remi in his wife in a shack which shows how he is indeed a traveler and not a tourist.
The theme of reasons for travel and the type of traveler that Sal in particular is also important to discuss. Numerous times throughout the novel, there is conflicting evidence on why Sal really travels. He can resemble a recreational tourist, a diversionary tourist, an experiential tourist, an experimental tourist and even an existentialist tourist. He displays a recreational mode of travel when being described by his aunt. Kerouac says, “My aunt was all in accord with my trip to the West; she said it would do me good, I’d been working so hard all winter and staying in too much” (9). Here, Sal resembles a recreational tourist who needs a break and wants to travel for rejuvenation. Sal also resembles traveling with a diversionary mode of travel when Kerouac states, “For a moment it was no different from being in Newark, except for the great hugeness outside that I loved so much” (34). It can also be argued that he traveled to the West to distract himself from the mundane lifestyle back in NYC.
Sal also shows off an experiential style to travel when he is described as saying, “I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang..” (35). He is using an image of his friends enjoying themselves in Denver to fuel his desire to travel there. The reader is exposed to an experimental side to Sal as well. He goes from NYC, to the Midwest, to Colorado and then to San Francisco. Sal seems to be on a search for a new centre and travels from place to place in search of one. Kerouac describes this when he describes Sal as saying, “I was itching to get on to San Francisco” (56). Finally we see the final mode of travel that Sal certainly exemplifies. Kerouac states, “I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn’t know who I was” (15). Sal may be using his trip to the West Coast in search of a completely new centre. He is going to the West Coast with his set of East Coast values maybe in search of completely changing his life and starting brand new. Throughout the novel, he shows no signs of wanting to return home right away which leaves open this possibility as well. This helps show how Sal goes through all the modes of travel which is what makes this novel even more special to read in my opinion.
My Experiences in San Francisco
I talk about myself
After living in New York for over a month, I noticed the stylistic differences between East and West Coast Jazz. For the most part, jazz musicians emphasize the feel more than technique on the West Coast. Every great musician I’ve seen out here is also a great technician and has knowledge of polyrhythms, but the feeling suffers. It’s all intense, edgy, and driving without much else. I enjoy both scenes and the musicians who play their style well, but there are wack crowds on both sides.
Only one bar in San Francisco had real New York style jazz being played in it and it was called Grant and Green. They offered jazz one night a week and it was a jam session led by the trumpeter, Mike Olmos. The environment just is not welcoming; every musician has a “balls-to-the-wall” New York attitude to them. It didn’t dislike the place though. All of the newest music was being played there and it really is an experimental place. Jam sessions are designed for trying out new tunes and for learning through experimentation in a laid-back environment. This session isn’t laid back, but it taught me how to deal with stern musicians.
Sal always feels as if his spiritual centre isn’t with his home. He feels superficially attached to New York and returns because he can call it “home”, but his spiritual centre is on the move for the majority of the book. On his first trip out to San Francisco, he says, “The bus trip from Denver to Frisco was uneventful except that my whole soul leaped to it the nearer we got to Frsico,” (54) showing how his heart is already in his next destination. Then Sal hitchhikes and takes buses back to New York, but it still is not home. Sal says, “Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life? I had my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too”(99). His home has significance because he used to live there, but it doesn’t feel right. He attaches himself to the road. Oh and sometimes I used to kick it with Tobias Wolff’s son, Patrick Wolff, who is a great tenor saxophonist. Oh and the picture is of my best friend who dropped out of high school to play bass professionally in San Francisco. He currently lives with my drum teacher in the Sunset District.
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On the Road for What Reason?
A General Overview of Kerouac's On the Road
They finally leave the country to see the mysterious Mexico, which becomes their "heaven." However, when they get to Mexico they still can't settle in, they have to drive further south to Mexcio City. I kept noticing the fewer and fewer pages left, wondering "Where the hell is this going? Is there a On the Road Pt 2 I’m missing?" Their voyage again ends in disappointment, without ever finding IT.
But there were a few parts in Mexico I really enjoyed in connection with aspects of travel. Sal and Dean’s intimate relationship with Victor was incredibly sweet, though I kept thinking Victor was going to rob them at some point. He was just a genuinely nice person. I compared their friendship to Port’s with Smail, based on prostitution and drugs, but Victor seemed much warmer in comparison.
Finally, one thing that really blew me away was Sal’s explanation of the feeling he got from looking at the sweating little Indian girl. The idea that natives of such isolated lands will never be aware of the world outside of their limited existence. It was really eerie to read, because I have had the same exact thoughts when visiting third-world countries. What could these people possibly think about? Their entire lives are based on things I will never understand. They might as well be considered a different species. Of course we all have many things in common as well, and maybe Sal and I are over-romanticizing the whole idea, but it sure is a marvelous thing to think about.
I have read On the Road before, and I knew even before I started reading it that I would struggle with this blog post. I just really love the book and I can’t focus on specifics or themes, because to me I look at it like one big emotion. I tore through the novel in three days, and read it more for myself than for this blogpost. Here’s the outcome: a rambling and hopefully coherent piece.
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