a. 1. People who are lost want to find someone else
who is more lost to find themselves.
-Sal is lost in life and can’t find
enjoyment in the things he used to love. He feels trapped by his routine and
wants to get away from it. By finding Dean, Sal realizes how ignorant he was
being about his life and that he was actually doing okay with his steady, maybe
not as fun, but manageable life.
b. 2. Men spend their time chasing women and then
dumping them only to miss them and realize that they miss the emotional
connection they had with them and that a physical relation only goes so far.
-The mistreatment of women was an ongoing
theme in this book, and they say you can’t live with women, and you can’t live
without them. Women play a huge rule in the development of a man’s life. They
are men’s soul mates and once men find the right one, they are their best
friends and life companions. So maybe Sal’s journey was also a lot about
finding a woman to fill his void left by his ex-wife and therefore complete
himself in a way and finally become complacent with his life. Terry was
probably his best option, but he let her go, and in the end, regretted it.
c. 3. You only know how good it really is to have a
stable life until you live a life full of chaos, incommodity and confusion.
-To this situation, I feel like the
phrase “you don’t really know what you’ve got till it’s gone” applied decently.
Sal saw his life as boring and repetitive, saw no more meaning to his writing
if his life was so dull. He ventured on a journey with a lunatic and pretty
much became a nomad for a while. In this time as a nomad, he had very little money,
uncomfortable places to sleep, little food, good parties, bad everyday life. It
wasn’t until he realized how much of a jackass Dean was that he retired from
that kind of life and went back to his old life that actually had some sense of
direction.
d. 4. When one tries to see the good and find answers
in someone else that only provides more questions, one befriends everyone’s
enemy and can only go forward with their life until they are able to let go of
that cancerous person.
- Dean is a cancer to Sal, which is
not hard to see. People get tired of Dean and his reckless acts and Sal would
have a lot more friends and good company if he let go of Dean. Dean is that
little devil people see on their left shoulder, and the problem with Sal is
that he hasn’t found anyone to be the angel on the right side.
I think that the second thesis is the strongest, firstly because you use very prevalent example from the novel. Secondly I think that it is strong because I writing something similar to this thesis and there are a lot of examples of Dean and Sal trying to fill a void with women and then dumping them when they feel the women are useless to them, so it should be pretty easy to write about. I think the first thesis is a bit vague and it might be difficult to write about, but I'm not sure its applicable to the novel. The fourth thesis confuses me a bit, I am not sure what you are trying to say exactly. Maybe when you expand it then it will make more sense to the readers.
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