Oh so anti-climactic

Like Mona, I am also frustrated by how anti-climactic everything is in this book. It bothers me that both the main character and the man he most admires (Dean) never seem to make any true sense. Many times, I became excited reading one of Dean's speeches, and then got completely disappointed. It seems to me that Dean he tries hard to be a "mystic" but always falls flat. For example, when Dean and Sal go off to Virginia to pick up Sal's aunt, Dean talks about his belief in God. He says that he cannot debate God's existence and he assures Sal that he holds the same opinion. He then begins to ponder how people affect each other's lives, and how a silly kid with a rock could kill an unsuspecting driver. Reading this, I began to assume Dean was talking about the seemingly random 'flow' of life. "You can't make it with geometry and geometrical systems of thinking" (p. 111), he says. At that point I believed Dean was talking about how life is unpredictable. This made a great deal of sense when considering their hectic trips on the road.

Dean then, however, assures Sal that he has no doubt everything is planned out and taken care of for them. It was not a complete reversal of what he had said, but it still threw me off the general idea.
In a way, Dean has a childlike trust in the world; maybe some could view it as a 'clarity'. He is, as is often referred to in Taoism, an 'uncarved block'. Nothing affects him and he simply keeps moving- never thinking, never questioning.

For this reason Dean frustrates me far more than the narrator from Notes From the Underground. I find that paradoxical narrator to be much more relatable than Dean, who strikes me as an annoying, self centered child. I am almost finished with the book, but as I have read in Mona's comment, it unfortunately will not get much more exciting.
-Anike