Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
is a seminal road narrative detailing four journeys first-person narrator Sal
Paradise makes in association with his friend Dean Moriarty. In his “Delicate
Dynamics of Friendship,” George Dardess argues that On the Road is not a series of fragmented episodes but a novel
tracing the rise and fall of the friendship between the two men. While I see On the Road as a novel also, I argue
that the plot has a slightly different focus. For me, On the Road is more of a Bildungsroman,
Sal’s journey into adulthood. Key to this journey is Sal’s search for a male
role model. Initially, that model is Dean, but as the novel progresses, Sal’s
perception of Dean becomes more conflicted, and he tries to separate his own philosophical
search from Dean’s destructive behaviors. In the end, Sal accepts some
conventional male roles as necessary to his own happiness. In accepting these
roles, Sal achieves a balance between individual enlightenment and responsibility
toward others. His accomplishment demonstrates that one person’s freedom is
necessarily limited by the freedom of others.
In Part One, Sal lacks a male role model and clings to the
promise of hanging out with Dean that launches him across the country as a
hitchhiker. Part One begins with Sal’s predicament: his parents are dead, so he
has no father figure to provide a suitable male role model. Since Sal and his
wife have divorced and this experience has negatively affected him enough to
make him ill and despairing about finding meaning in life, Sal clearly needs a
role model to help him transition into a more effective adulthood. It’s also
evident that Sal has not found an appropriate role model during his military
service, as he rejects guns and violence and displays of power, such as that
associated with the presidential inauguration.
Stepping into this void, Dean provides inspiration. Sal
would like to be “mad” like Dean, “mad to live, mad to talk, made to be saved,
desirous of everything at the same time, [. . . to] burn, burn, burn like
fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars” (5-6). The
image of the fireworks is beautiful. The flame represents passion, the fact
that fireworks light up the sky indicates their power, and their momentary
duration parallels the “everything at the same time” desire of youth to spend
their energy in the moment rather than spread out over their adult lives. Sal
spends Part One anticipating being with Dean, not “talking to Dean for more
than five minutes in the whole time” he was in Denver (59). That fact that Dean
is largely absent yet pulls Sal like a magnet indicates his power over Dean’s
life.
In Part Two, Dean becomes a physically present role model,
as Sal spends time with him, listening to his stories and following his
exhortations to “dig” lived experience. By simple force of personality, Dean is
able to change Sal from wanting to stay with his girlfriend Lucille to thinking
of Lucille as an “affair [that] wouldn’t last much longer” and as someone who
wants Sal “to be her way” (125). Dean’s
presence turns commitment to women into the stereotypical “ball and chain,” the
bride who will tie men down to domestic cares and the working world. The fact
that Lucille is already married and that Dean’s wife Marylou is present and
desirable just makes it easier for Sal to view Lucille this way. In substitute
for domesticity, Dean indicates he plans to help Sal “’finally get it’” (127),
which seems to the ultimate in ecstatic experience of living: never being “’hung-up,
[. . .] go[ing] in every direction, [. . .] let[ting] it all out, [. . .] know[ing]
time, [. . .] ha[ving] nothing to do but rock back and forth’” (127). “It” is
the ultimate connection with the world, both peaceful and dynamic, both timely
and eternal, and most importantly not “hung-up” on conventional rules, not
responsible to anything or anyone. As a model for masculinity, Dean epitomizes
the free man who doesn’t let rules or the needs of others drag him down. Meaning
occurs only in constant motion.
Toward the end of Part Two, when Dean abandons Sal and
Marylou without money in San Francisco, Sal begins to question Dean’s approach
as potentially dangerous to himself and others. Once he and Marylou finally find
a place to stay and food, Sal thinks to himself, “Where is Dean and why isn’t
he concerned about our welfare?” (171) The kind of man who would light out
after sexual pleasure before ensuring his first wife and his friend had the
means to take care of themselves begins to be less appealing when Sal is on the
receiving end of his insensitivity. The failure of Dean as an ideal coincides
with Sal’s depression regarding the trip: “It was the end; I wanted to get out”
(178). The failure of Dean’s as a role model puts Sal back where he began in
Part One: sullen and uncaring.
When Sal returns to Dean in Part Three, Dean lacks the old magic
that made him a mentor to Sal. Galatea challenges Dean’s lifestyle, saying “’you
haven’t had any sense of responsibility for anyone,’” and when Dean can’t “talk[]
his way out,” Sal feels compelled to defend him, yet he can’t quite work
himself up to full faith in Dean. Dean is “the HOLY GOOF,” the ultimate “BEAT,”
both pitiful and “Beatific.” He is a man experiencing revelations but no longer
any that might be shared or used to purify life. Sal’s best defense of Dean is
to indicate he and Dean are going to Italy (194-95). In answer to Dean’s
failure, Sal uses the road as an escape. No longer does Dean’s image promise an
answer or a destination for a man tired of the world; Dean simply represents
prolonging the moment of escape.
Sal’s disappointment in Dean permeates the rest of Part
Three and the trip to Mexico City in Part Four. He comments, “With frantic Dean
I was rushing through the world without a chance to see it” (206), and he tells
Dean, “’You’re really going much too fast’” (227). Sal is ready to slow down
and make more mature connections. When Dean steals multiple cars, Sal is the
one who moves the stolen cars to try and to keep the law from coming down on
their friends. He cares about them and doesn’t want them to be hurt by Dean’s illegal
actions. The image of roman candles (fireworks) reoccurs in that sequence, but
no longer is it filled with exuberance for life. Instead, the fireworks are “lonely
as the Prince of the Dharma who’s lost his ancestral grove and journeys across
the spaces between points in the handle of the Big Dipper, trying to find it
again” (223). In this revised version, the fireworks indicate loneliness and
loss of place. The “Prince of the Dharma” is Buddha who belongs in his “ancestral
grove” but can no longer find it. The fact that one of the holiest of men has
lost his place and is wandering the stars suggests that the world itself is
lost and ordinary men, men like Dean and Sal, are in even more trouble. In this
off-kilter world, Dean cannot model masculine behavior for Sal. Sal needs to
find his own path.
Ultimately, when Dean abandons Sal during Sal’s illness in
Mexico City, he demonstrates that he is not a caring and reliable friend. When
Sal gets well, he “realize[s] what a rat [Dean] was” (303). In this act, Dean once
again proves his is not a good male role model but merely an acquaintance whose
company lasts as long as it serves his own self-interest.
In the end, Sal becomes his own man, falling in love with
his dream-girl Laura and rejecting the urge to skip out on a Duke Ellington
concert to hang out with Dean. Although life lacks some of the spontaneity Sal
enjoyed with Dean, Sal no longer needs to travel to “dig” “all the people
dreaming” along the road across America (307). He has family and friends nearby
who care about him. The last image of the father Dean never found confirms that
Sal never found a father in Dean, but he is mature enough now to understand
that “nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody,” and that that lack of
control is OK. In recognizing Dean’s version of freedom and masculinity as
lacking in real affection, Sal is finally able to separate from Dean’s
influence and begin to make a meaningful life for himself.
In reflecting on the balance Sal achieves in growing into
his own man, I think of the fact that Dean never understood freedom. He only
understood half of freedom, his half. There is another half of freedom that
belongs to all the other “people dreaming” in the world. If I assume that my
freedom belongs to me as a human being, and I believe that other people are
also human, I must admit that my freedom is limited by my responsibility to
theirs. The fact that Dean never developed responsibility to others made him a
poor male role model for Sal. The fact that Sal grew into a man capable of
caring for and taking responsibility for his treatment of others emphasizes the
need for this more mature view of freedom.
Works Cited
Dardess, George. "The Delicate Dynamics Of
Friendship: A Reconsideration Of Kerouac's On The Road." American Literature: A Journal Of Literary
History, Criticism, And Bibliography 46.2 (1974): 200-206. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 20 June 2012.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin, 1955.
Print.
