Term Paper Part 1

Kerouac's notion of time seems to be that of an entity that is constantly moving and constantly taking others with it. During the novel, Sal feels many different emotions concerning this reality. As he sees his friends growing smaller in the rear window of a car as he leaves them, he laments not being able to be a part of their lives permanently. Yet, the madness he seeks makes such permanence is impossible to achieve. This is also the case in the memories that Sal and Dean continually share. They cannot conquer the past, so they continually try to relive it by replenishing it with new memories as they travel once again across the country.

Time, throughout the novel, seems to not exist, for the most part, within the world that Sal and Dean share. This lifestyle was originally introduced by Dean to Sal since Dean convinced Sal to take his first steps towards traveling along this never-ending trip which includes going back and forth across the country. Though, in reality, these trips do take time and take up huge sections of Sal’s life, this does not prevent Sal from retaking these trips as if to escape from the boring aspects of life. Dean, throughout the novel, revisits Sal and convinces him each time to take some trip cross-country with him. Sal, as usual, agrees to take these trips as if he were addicted to doing so. In retrospect however, Sal takes these trips as to forget the past that he had at that moment and replace it with new memories from this trip. Since Sal needs to do this over and over again, he continuously does so with the help of Dean, his soul mate who accompanies Sal on most of these journeys and who, like Sal, suffers from the same addiction of replenishing memories with new ones. This addiction that both characters share seems to play along with this reoccurring theme of “madness” and how it correlates with those who move the fastest. “In Oakland I had a beer among the bums of a saloon with a wagon wheel in front of it, and I was on the road again. I walked clear across Oakland to get on the Fresno road. Two rides took me to Bakersfield, four hundred miles south. The first was the mad one, with a burly blond kid in a souped- up rod. "See that toe?" he said as he gunned the heap to eighty and passed everybody on the road. "Look at it." It was swathed in bandages. "I just had it amputated this morning. The bastards wanted me to stay in the hospital. I packed my bag and left. What’s a toe?" Yes, indeed, I said to myself, look out now, and I hung on. You never saw a driving fool like that. He made Tracy in no time.” (I.12.2) in this passage, it is obvious that Sal understands the madness that lives within the racing of time but fails to do anything about it. With this information, we can assume that Sal is either to afraid to take on the madness or that he is so consumed with the addiction that he is unfit to fight against the power that has now driven him mad which originated within Dean.