Final Draft Term Paper

On the Road is a novel that expresses the thrill of taking that unknown path and the road not taken to see where it gets you in life. We sometimes get complacent with our lives and start to wonder what could have been if things had been done differently, and so we take two steps back to see if we can take three forward, but in cases, failure is inevitable and the receding steps don’t stop. That is why we try to change things and meet different people. We feel lost and anonymous in the big crowd and so we search for that special someone that makes us feel important and alive again. In other words, we look for someone who feels even more lost, because as human nature calls, we are always the most important person in our life, and so feeling better than the rest is always a priority.

In this particular case, the main character Sal Paradise is stuck in a life stage where he has reached his limit and his life has steadied off, making it repetitive and dull to him. Sal is married and has a writing career in front of him, but as he stops and ponders on what his life has come to he decided this is not what he wants and thus decides to throw it all away and start fresh. Sal has a problem because he becomes complacent with the life that people dream about. People grow up and do everything in order to finally settle down with the person they love and do what they love, but Sal resents his choice to let his life die down and wants to take action to give his youth another shot at the adventurous and rebellious life, and Dean Moriarity was the perfect person to make that happen.

When Sal met Dean it was like destiny punching him in the face. Sal saw this reckless, crazy, poor womanizer and saw the perfect opportunity to leave his old life behind and start a new life of party and uncertainty. Dean was everything Sal wanted to be. Spontaneous, charming, happy with his life, careless of what will be to come the next day. Sal is lost and vulnerable in this moment. He is vulnerable to be deceived by his own conscience that would otherwise know that this is a horribly risky decision, but his soul is in such a desperate search for that other, worst and more lost soul, that he decides to start chasing Dean. By choosing to follow this ticking time bomb of a man Sal has also decided to leave behind his wife and put his writing career on pause, but hoping to run into some inspiration on this unforeseen journey.

After choosing to leave his wife and put his career on pause, Sal ventures off to follow Dean across the country to see what he would do next. Sal ends up following Dean to Denver, and although Dean is not there a long time, Sal still enjoys his time there. Dean always finds a way to get lost in one place and, with very little money or resources, is able to carry on his nomadic lifestyle from one city to the next. This makes it very hard for Sal to follow him, and so sometimes Sal is stuck with Dean’s entourage, one may say. This entourage involves characters such as Carlo Marx, who Sal absolutely falls in love with because of his vivid personality and his desire to party and drink and meet women, which is just what Sal is looking for to find his new personality, or the personality he thought he never had which may just be lost within.  This is another reason why Sal follows Dean. Dean has met interesting people in his life that compliment his way of life. These people are somewhat mad, just like Dean, and can even be categorized as other lost souls as they party and drink their way through life. All of Dean’s friends, the other hitch-hikers, and even all of Sal’s old friends have something in common when it comes to this journey. They all have the ability to show Sal something new, something unknown to the young writer who is looking for inspiration to find his true meaning and go back home content with his discovery and finally start writing again with the passion he started with.

Sal realizes he is not always in Dean’s presence, but it is as if Dean had a pre-made path for Sal to go on. This path has twists and loops which Dean has shortcuts to and so he can avoid them and keep going with his life, but for Sal all these unexpected stops and people are new pieces to the puzzle of his life. Each person has something new to bring to the table. Whether it is partying, women, a job, or even being someone who Sal does not want to associate with any longer after the first encounter. Every person is a different experience, a different acquisition to Sal’s soul search so Sal can pick and choose which qualities he enjoys seeing in others so he can mold his personality to fit that and become the best person he believes he could be. In a way this is bad because Sal is not being true to himself and doing everything he wants to do, but he conforms to the group ideal, and since he likes this group, he changes himself to adapt to their lifestyle and he keeps following Dean to meet new pieces to his soul puzzle. 

As Sal carries on with his nomadic adventure of following Dean, he starts realizing that Dean is not that loved character he thought. Dean started off being liked by everyone because he was so fun and easy going and he did not worry about the little things. The problem is, in the end, it is the little things that matter. Towards the end of their journey, Sal is brought into these sort of Anti-Dean conversations in which everyone has something bad to say about Dean or they have a list of complaints about him that they want to get off their chest. Mary Lou is a good example because out of everyone, she would be the one people thought would stay by Dean’s side, but even she loses interest in his unsettled life, as well as the fact that she is somewhat of a nymphomaniac and puts her physical desires before her emotional ones and even considers leaving Dean for Sal at one point. Another example is when Galatea and Camille and everyone else confront Sal and tell him that Dean is no good for him, and anyone who sticks around Dean and is loyal to him gets hurt, because Dean is incapable of prioritizing correctly and he is selfish with what he wants because he does not care who he throws under a bus to get it. It gets complicated for Sal though because he has a passion for Dean. He enjoys being with Dean and living like him. This is a problem because Sal starts to take Deans personality qualities and becomes someone people won’t like in the future because, like Dean, they’ll get tired of his selfishness and inability to put others before himself when necessary. The treatment of women has been touched on before, but it can be a reoccurring example because Sal learns to be this player with the women from his observational learning with Dean in which Sal sees it works, Dean gets women, so if he does the same then he will get women as well. In the end, Dean’s old friends leave him and it becomes Sal and Dean against the world. This is somewhat of a good thing for Sal because he finally has the quality alone time with Dean he has been yearning for since the beginning and now, instead of following him around, they make plans together and even decide to go Italy. That beautiful plan for their future is of course destroyed by Dean being careless again and wasting all his money and coming up with another scheme to go to Mexico. This is an eye opening trip for Sal because on this journey is where he finally realizes how much of a selfish person Dean really is. After Sal gets Dean out of trouble by saying he’s his “brother”, Sal is proud to be able to say that, and realizes he loves Dean in a brotherly way. It is not until later though that Dean leaves Sal in Mexico incredibly sick so he can go and chase a girl back to the states, and what is sad is that even though Sal sees the true carelessly evil nature in Dean, he can’t help but want to stay by his side.

The adventure keeps going and its repetitiveness is evident to Sal, who at this point is wondering why he is even still chasing this lunatic.  He has become basically homeless and poor, has lost any significant love of any woman that really meant anything to him, and is taking life day by day with exasperation and tiredness of all the complications that he has faced. Sal appears to be content and complacent with his situation because he keeps lying to himself. He keeps telling himself this is what he wants out of life and Dean is who he wants to idolize and become like. Sal uses cognitive dissonance thoughts to tell himself that this life experience has been worth it. He tells himself that the lost soul inside of him is growing stronger with the unexpected journeys, the sleeping around with strange woman to fill that void, both physical and emotional, that men must feel to be happy, and the meeting of new people, some whom he would be much better off with than Dean but because Dean is so nomadic has barely any chances to see them. It is painful to see this because it shows how lost Sal really is. He wants to be someone he is not and shouldn’t be because he thinks this lifestyle is working for Dean, when in reality, Dean’s life is torn into pieces.

            The phrase “the grass is always greener on the other side” applies perfectly to Sal’s view on life because he is never fully satisfied with what he has, and spends time away from Dean only to go back to him and embark in another cross country trip with no true destination. The tables even turn though, and this is where we can see Dean’s desperation. There is a point where Sal goes back to New York and is about to marry a girl, but as always, Dean shows up and causes trouble, and even talks Sal into thinking that they should swing girlfriends, which ends the relationship Sal had with this girl obviously. The problem with Sal is that he does not realize how much more lost Dean is than him, and so he is letting Dean bring him down with him. The trip to Mexico is the last straw for Sal because he understands now how messed up Dean’s life really is, and even though Dean screws him over and leaves him to nearly die in a foreign country, Sal still sees him as his brother and he feels sympathy for him because he now gets the bigger picture of why he did everything he did. His ability to see Dean’s lost soul helps him feel better about himself and understand that his life was never the train wreck he thought it was.

            In the end, Sal misses what he once had and puts an end to this crisis stage in his life because he feels more in contact with himself after seeing how destroyed Dean really was. Dean is missing someone to truly love, he is missing enjoyment of the little things in life, and he is missing the true and basic understanding of what it is to live life to the fullest. Sal doesn’t resent Dean for this at all though, and even sticks to the idea that Dean is his brother.

 Word Count: 2036