Jack Kerouac seems to
continually talk about through the narration of life on the road as something
better and more excited then a stable lifestyle. He uses Dean and Sal as the
vessels to exult the party lifestyle. Jack Kerouac emphasis the
unstable and abusive relationships between Sal’s and Dean and their respective
female partners to glorify the irresponsible lifestyle of the “road”.
The first establish characteristic of
Jack Kerouac’s glorified idea of the “road” lifestyle is a person who is not
too attached to anyone or anything because he/she is always on the move. Sal
and Dean exemplify this characteristic because they are able to easily detach
themselves from people or situations to continue their journey on the road. Sal
Paradise, the protagonist, is a recently divorce man living in New Jersey with
his aunt. He has no stable job or family that would hold him to down in
anyplace. His life had grown stagnate and routine, and he longed for the sort
of adventure that would inspire his writing and reinvigorate his life. This
desire for inspiration and adventure leads him to venture out into the American
West. All these traits makes Sal the perfect candidate for the “road”
lifestyle. On his travels Sal proves that he is capable of escaping
relationships. Sal meets a Mexican girl named Terry, and they begin traveling
together. Soon the two of them settle down for a while in little town in
California called Sabinal with Terry family and her son. He and the son,
Johnny, hit it off, and Sal begins to be a father figure to the boy. Sal gets a
job, and had to support his new “family” by picking cotton. At first he enjoyed
family life. Then the “road” calls for him again, and he starts to have the
urge to leave. Sal said “I could feel the pull of my own life calling me back”
(pg.98, Jack Kerouac). He imagined the relationship to be a break from his
actual life and he never intended to keep it.
He no longer enjoyed the responsible of taking care of a Terry and her
son. So as quickly as the urge to go to New York erupted inside of him, he was
just as quickly abandoning Terry and her baby. Sal continues on without regret,
and almost immediately begins a new relationship with a new girl. Sal behavior
was probably influence by his friends, and the series of mischievous acts they
played on women. They would seduce them, use them, and then discard them when
they were no longer of use to them. For example, one of Sal friends, Ed Dunkel,
was running low on money. He met a woman who is considerable wealthier then he
was, and out of convenience; he married her so he could continue on his road
trip across the country. When she stopped funding the trip, he ditched her in a
small town in the middle of nowhere. Dean, Sal’s friend and idol, was constantly
traveling. He would settle in a town or city until he no longer found pleasure
in the places he was staying. He treated the woman that he was with similarly.
He would also abandon woman as soon as they were no longer “fun” to be with. It
is predicable that once Sal Paradise started hanging out with people who
personified the “road” lifestyle, he would begin to act similarly.
The second characteristic of the “road”
lifestyle is the ability to shirk responsibility without consequence. The best
part about doing something capricious and immoral is not getting caught
afterward. The allure of doing something bad and not getting caught is the one
of the primary factor for people to continue engaging in nefarious activities.
To glorify this nomadic lifestyle, Jack Kerouac made Dean Moriarty untouchable.
His bad deeds came almost explicitly without consequence. Dean Moriarty was the master of
irresponsibility and immaturity, and Sal was slowly influences by the action of
Dean towards all of the women in his life. Marriage is, of course, an
extraordinary commitment. It requires the understanding, by both parties, of
monogamy and care, both fiscally and emotionally. Dean Moriarty in the
beginning of the novel had a beautiful wife named Mary Lou. She was the envy of
all of Dean’s friends, and she was madly in love with him. Later on in the
novel, Dean decided to cheat on Mary Lou with a girl named Camille. He kept
them both in the same hotel, in different room. Dean would travel from one room
to the other, sleeping with each girl and then leaving immediately after to see
the other. Not only did Dean go on for several months without getting caught,
but also his friends actually condemned him for it. They idolized his
inappropriate and hurtful behavior toward women. They talked about it in great
detail, and to continue the ridiculous trend of glorifying the emotional abuse
of women, they actually philosophized about it together. Dean and Carlo Marx actually
decided while discussing it one night that cheating on both the women was the
right thing to do. Then, when Dean was finally caught cheating, both Camille
and Mary Lou actually degraded themselves and forgave him. A second example of
Dean incredibly unpunished irresponsibility was the abandonment of his daughter
and wife. Camille, after dating Dean for a while, got pregnant out of wedlock.
Dean married her, and stayed with her during the entire length of her
pregnancy. Then a few months after his daughter was born, he left. He realized
that he was bored of married life, and that he missed his ex-wife, Mary Lou. So
Dean hitchhiked, and made his way back to Mary Lou, and even though she knew
that he abandon both his wife and child, she took him back. He left Camille
without a penny, and he was never punished for it. Then, Dean came crawling
back to Camille after Mary Lou came to her senses, and realized that she could
never truly have all of Dean, and she
decided to leave him. Camille then took Dean back after he cheated on her, and
abandoned her and her child. Jack Kerouac made the female character moral weak,
to make the male character seem superior. Also by making the female character’s
weak, it made it easy for Dean and Sal to get away with their actions, because
they knew that no matter what they do, the females feel that they “need” them,
so they would take them back.
Similar to the first
characteristic of the road lifestyle, the third characteristic is the ability
to shirk off irresponsibility without consequence. Sal, Dean, and the rest of
their misfit gang of nomads and vagabonds, take absolutely no responsibility
for anything that they do on the road. This immaturity and irresponsibility
extends to their relationships with women, their friendships with each other,
and their regular everyday fiscal responsibilities. Dean, as mention in
the previous paragraphs, has a tendency to be incapable of commit. Dean gets
his girlfriend, Camille, pregnant. Dean knew that the implications of
fatherhood were emotional and fiscal commitment to his child and the child’s
mother. This frightened Dean, but instead of facing it head on like a real man
should and would, he run away. He abandoned his pregnant girlfriend and their
child to continue on living a free spirited lifestyle. Even though, he was
suppose to pay child support, he never kept a steady job or even attempted to
pay the bills. Yet Camille made no effort to force him to pay the money,
and seemly let him go scot-free. Kerouac proving the point through Dean, that
men can easily and without consequence, shirk their responsibility, while
females are stuck burying the burdens of their mutual mistakes. During this
period of time, Dean ran off to find Mary Lou, his first wife. He traveled on
the road with her for several months, under the pretense that once they return
to Camille the relationship would be over. Mary Lou was so desperately in love
with Dean that she did not care that he was using her as a mechanism to avoid
irresponsibility. Then when Dean returned Camille, she took Dean back into her
life without question, even though it was clear that he had cheated on her all
those months that he had been away.
Sal has little money while
he is on the road, and he has to attempt to make some income. He first gets a
job as a waiter, which Dean put his neck out on the line for Sal to get, and Sal
does not even show up to the first day of work. Then Sal becomes a policeman;
he then gets drunk on the job and accidentally puts the American flag on upside
down. This mistake gets both Sal and his friend fired from his job. Then Sal
becomes a cotton picker, the work becomes too difficult for him and he feels
inadequate and he quits. Even though his attempts to sustain his own income are
weak at best, he is able to live off of his aunt and uncle’s hard earned wages.
Sal, like Dean, is able to avoid irresponsibility and still live life to the
fullest. Finally, both Sal and Dean, alienate friend from their inability to
keep promises. Sal promises his friend, Remi, that he will be on best behavior
when his Remi’s dad arrives. Instead of keeping to his promise, Sal gets drunk
using Remi’s dad credit card and embarrasses Remi and his Dad inside a very
reputable restaurant.
The final characteristic that is
portrayed by the men in On The Road was
the ability to command a strong loyalty with their friends and their lovers.
The main example of this would be Dean. Dean’s irrationally, borderline
psychotic, and unsympathetic behavior verges, at least to the readers, as
nearly unlovable. Yet, Dean is not only loved but idolized by those around him.
Dean is adored by almost every character that he meets, with very few
exceptions. Sal looks up to Dean and, in
essences, his journey to the American West was not only inspired by Dean but
also it was made in a effort to emulate him.
Jack Kerouac used Dean as someone who could do no wrong in terms of his
friends, even when they were mad at him; it never really lasted very long. The
first example of this is Dean relationship with Marylou. Dean starts off bring
her to New York, when they are first married. Sal characterizes the
relationship as rocky. They were constantly arguing with one and another. The
most appropriate description of the relationship was emotionally abusive. Even
though Mary Lou talked of leaving, it was clear that no matter how bad things
got with Dean that she still was madly in love with him. The two of them went
through a lot, and it was mostly him inflicted pain on her. In one passage of
the novel, Dean describes to Sal hitting Mary Lou when he found out that she
had moved on with another man. The emotionally abusive relationship turned
physically abusive, yet it seems that neither Dean nor Sal are at all perturbed
by Dean’s action. Sal continues to love Dean like a younger brother, and Dean
continues to act without thought for others. Sal describes several times before
this, that both Mary Lou and Dean would walk out of the car with bumps and bruise,
and Sal never made a comment to Dean or judged. While I assumed that the
unconditional loyalty and love extended only to the females in Deans life, like
Mary Lou, Camille, and Inez, as it turns out, Sal was also quite guilty of
overlooking Dean’s flaws for the sake of maintaining their friendship. The most
prevalent example, is when Dean and Sal travel to Mexico together. Dean swears
off women after Inez gives birth to his child, and Camille has already had two
of them. They make it to Mexico and they go to a brothel, where Sal and Dean
drink, do drugs, and have sex with multiple women. Sal does not realize that
the water in Mexico is not as clean as the water in America. He contracts
dysentery. Dean, unwilling to care for Sal while he is sick, abandons Sal in
Mexico without friends or money to return home. Yet, Sal forgives him and
continues to praise him until the end of the novel without fail.
Word count: 2080
Bibliography
Kerouac,
Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1997. Print.
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