Early Criticism, Cultural Impact, and Contemporary Relevance of On the Road and the Beat Literary Movement

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When it was published in 1957, On the Road fascinated America with its seemingly aimless outcasts seeking thrills across the continent. It is the autobiographical account of Jack Kerouac's life in the late 1940s. Kerouac was recognized as the father of the Beat Generation with the publication of his novel. The Beat literary movement actually started with a small group of bohemians living in New York City during the mid1940s. The group included Kerouac, poet Allen Ginsberg, and professional eccentric William Burroughs. The men were trying to define a "New Vision" in literature, and they discussed and criticized various works of literature and theories of writing. Kerouac met a charismatic drifter from Denver named Neal Cassady during this period. Cassady ultimately inspired the character of Dean Moriarty in On the Road, and he inspired Kerouac himself to go on the road. The manic movement of Sal Paradise in On the Road, with and without Dean Moriarty, is directly patterned after Kerouac's reallife travel during the same period. The novel shocked many readers of the late 1950s with its depictions of pointless travel, drug use, and promiscuous sex. And although some critics were excited by Kerouac's style, many thought Beat literature was adolescent, even immoral. However, the novel continues to be popular both as a critical subject and with readers (especially college students). It is interesting to review the novel and its early criticism with the hindsight of knowing the impact it had on American culture after its publication.

Both Gilbert Millstein and, to a lesser extent, David Dempsey, wrote favorable reviews for On the Road in The New York Times when the book was first published. Millstein believed that the novel depicted a quest for spiritual affirmation. The characters behave excessively, he wrote, because "the search for belief is very likely the most violent known to man." Because of this theme, and what he believed to be the beauty of the writing, Millstein insisted that On the Road was a major novel. Millstein's colleague at the Times, Dempsey, agreed that the novel was a "stunning achievement," but he believed that the characters acted out of a "neurotic necessity" rather than a spiritual one. Like Dempsey, many critics were impressed with Kerouac's raw talent, but still found flaws in the novel. For example, they noted the lack of characterization. Dempsey wrote that Kerouac's characters "are not developed but simply presented; they perform, take their bows and do a hand-spring into the wings." Gene Baro, in the New York Herald Tribune, also pointed out that the novel's characterizations are "given and illustrated rather than developed." These critics, and several others, considered Kerouac to be a major talent despite the flaws in his second novel.

Of course, there were many who were not infatuated with Kerouac's style. In his book The Birth of the Beat Generation, Steven Watson noted that "[a]fter the rave in the New York Times [for On the Road ], the positive reviews were more temperate, and the negative reviews outdid one another in bile." The attack on the novel, and on the Beat literary movement in general, was led by intellectual Columbia graduates Herbert Gold and Norman Podhoretz. In an essay published in The Nation, Gold claimed that Kerouac had "appointed himself prose celebrant to a pack of unleashed zazous." Podhoretz, who was Ginsberg's contemporary at Columbia, fervently scorned Kerouac's work. He could be especially vicious in his criticism, as when he stated in his essay "The KnowNothing Bohemians," first published in the Partisan Review, that he believed Kerouac's manifesto to be: "Kill the intellectuals who can...

(This entire section contains 1552 words.)

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talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause." It should be noted here that Kerouac was never convicted of murder.

The problem with Kerouac's most vehement critics was their inability to criticize On the Road strictly on its literary merit. Podhoretz treated On the Road as if it were a threat to Western civilization rather than a uniquely stylized autobiographical novel about people on the fringe of society. What Podhoretz really seemed to resent was Kerouac's spontaneity, which, in his opinion, was a lack of control. Podhoretz has been quoted as saying, "Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy—the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence." In this quote, he indicates that while the exuberance of a child is welcome in the creative process, adult supervision is required. Kerouac certainly did not subscribe to this, as shown by several items on his "list of essentials" in his "Belief & Technique for Modern Prose":

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy … 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening … 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow … 28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better …..

Kerouac imposed no restrictions on his creative "child," and this is perhaps what offended Podhoretz more about On the Road than anything. Podhoretz was unable to recognize any of the intelligence and poetry of the novel because he not only disapproved of Kerouac's lifestyle, he also found Kerouac's creative philosophy abhorrent. Currently, Podhoretz is a senior fellow at a conservative think tank, the Hudson Institute. It is strange to consider that Kerouac, who became friends with conservative icon William F. Buckley, Jr. and supported the Vietnam War in the 1960s, was closer to Podhoretz in political ideology than in artistic theory.

Despite some lukewarm reviews and the furor of conservative intellectual critics, On the Road was a popular success. Several books Kerouac wrote during the 1950s were quickly published and he became a celebrity. Kerouac tried to explain the Beat phenomenon to middleclass America in various print, radio, and television interviews. He emphasized the spiritual dimensions of his work and the word "beat." Kerouac was credited with an entry in the Random House dictionary with the definition of the Beat Generation:

Members of the generation that came of age after World War II, who, supposedly as a result of disillusionment stemming from the Cold War, espouse mystical detachment and relaxation of social and sexual tensions.

Much to Kerouac's dismay, mainstream culture trivialized his work with "beatnik" clichés. The commercialization of Beat culture included several awful "B" movies and many paperback novels with beatnik themes. Perhaps the most egregious example of this fad was in the television series The Many Loves ofDobie Gillis (19591963). One of the characters on the series, Maynard G. Krebs (played by Bob Denver, whose later claim to fame was as the title character in Gilligan's Island), was a perfect illustration of the beatnik cliché. Krebs wore a goatee, used hipster slang, played the bongos, and avoided work whenever possible. The "beatnik" craze in American culture was, thankfully, shortlived. Of course, the passive beatnik evolved into the active hippie. On the Road was one part of the social and cultural forces that led to the youth revolution of the 1960s.

However, the continued popularity of On the Road can't be explained as mere nostalgia. Recently, the book was ranked number 624 in sales on the Internet bookstore Amazon.com. This is actually very impressive considering that the store has hundreds of thousands of titles. Young people are the book's most avid fans. Thus, Millstein's early praise of the book's "spirituality," embodied in the characters' "search for belief," has proven to be prescient. The search for identity or belief is a universal experience, and it is especially pertinent to young people. For example, it is hard to deny the youthful energy of the following passage from the novel:

the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.

It is this yearning, this desire to have "everything at the same time," that attracts so many readers. Sometimes, Sal's search for meaning seems futile, and instead of joy there is melancholy, as when he arrives in Times Square after one of his western sojourns:

I had traveled eight thousand miles around the American continent and I was back on Times Square; and right in the middle of a rush hour, too, seeing with my innocent roadeyes the absolute madness and fantastic horror of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck among themselves, the mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City.

The strength of On the Road is in its vivid portrayal of both the joy and the pain of being young. It is one thing to criticize Kerouac's verbosity, repetitiveness, and sentimentality; it is quite another to dismiss his work entirely because his characters lead unconventional lifestyles, or because his creative philosophy involved using emotion rather than "craft." Even after forty years, On the Road remains a vital work.

Source: Don Akers, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000.
Akers is a freelance writer with an interest in Beat literature.

Jack Kerouac's On the Road: A Re-evaluation

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Nothing has been published about Jack Kerouac for seven years. Most of what has been written is either hostile or condescending or both. While it may perhaps be true, as Melvin W. Askew suggests, that to speak of Jack Kerouac in the same breath with Melville, Twain and Hawthorne is to leave a smirch on the configuration of classic American literature, Kerouac has, as they have, provided an enduring portrait of the national psyche; like Fitzgerald, he has defined America and delineated American life for his generation. Certainly, Kerouac is not a great writer, but he is a good writer, and has more depth and control than his critics allow. On the Road is more than a crazy wild frantic embrace of beat life; implicit in Kerouac's portrayal of the beat generation is his criticism of it, a criticism that anticipates the charges of his most hostile critics. For example, Norman Podhoretz' assertion that the Beat Generation's worship of primitivism and spontaneity ….. arises from a pathetic poverty of feeling, parallels Kerouac's own insights in On the Road.

In that novel Kerouac makes it clear that Sal Paradise goes on the road to escape from life rather than to find it, that he runs from the intimacy and responsibility of more demanding human relationships, and from a more demanding human relationship with himself. With all their emphasis on spontaneity and instinct, Sal and his friends are afraid of feeling on any other than the impassive and ultimately impersonal wow level. For Sal especially, emotion is reduced to sentimentality, role-playing and gesture. His responses are most often the blanket, indiscriminate wow! or the second-hand raptures gleaned from books and movies; he thrills to San Francisco as Jack London's town and melodramatically describes leaving his Mexican mistress:

Emotionlessly she kissed me in the vineyard and walked off down the row. We turned at a dozen paces, for love is a duel, and looked at each other for the last time…. Sal is continually enjoying himself enjoying himself, raptly appreciating his performance in what seems more like an ongoing soapopera than an actual life: She'd left me a cape to keep warm; I threw it over my shoulder and skulked through the moonlit vineyard….A California home; I hid in the grapevines, digging it all. I felt like a million dollars; I was adventuring in the crazy American night.

Sal's self-conscious posturing undercuts his insistence on the life of instinct and impulse, and indicates his fear of emotions simply felt, of life perceived undramatically and unadorned. He responds to experience in a language of exaggeration; everything is the saddest or greatest or wildest in the world. Although on page 21 he meets a rawhide oldtime Nebraska farmer who has a great laugh, the greatest in the world, a few pages later he encounters Mr. Snow whose laugh, I swear on the Bible, was positively and finally the one greatest laugh in all this world. Reality is never good enough; it must be classified, embroidered and intensified; above all, the sheer reality of reality must be avoided. Sal's roleplaying shelters him from having to realize and respond to actual situations, and to the emotions and obligations, whether of others or of himself, inherent in those situations. He is protected from having to face and feel his own emotions as well as from having to deal with the needs and demands of other people. What Sal enthuses over as a California home Kerouac reveals as a place of poverty, frustration, anger and despair, but Sal's raptures cushion him from recognizing the grimness of the existence to which he is carelessly consigning his mistress and her small son, a child he had called my boy and played at fathering. By absorbing himself in the melodramatics of a renunciation scene, Sal is protected from the realities of Terry's feelings or her future, nor must he cope with his own emotions at parting with her.

Kerouac's characters take to the road not to find life but to leave it all behind: emotion, maturity, change, decision, purpose, and, especially, in the best American tradition, responsibility; wives, children, mistresses, all end up strewn along the highway like broken glass. Sal refuses responsibility not only for the lives of others but for his own life as well. He does not want to own his life or direct his destiny, but prefers to live passively, to be driven in cars, to entertain sensations rather than emotions. A follower, Sal is terrified of leading his own life; he is, as Kerouac points out, fearful of the wheel and hated to drive; he does not have a driver's license. He and Dean abdicate self-control in a litany of irresponsibility: It's not my fault, it's not my fault …, nothing in this lousy world is my fault. Both of them flee from relevance and significance, telling long, mindless stories and taking equally pointless trips. They avoid anything—selfanalysis, selfawareness, thinking— which would threaten or challenge them, for with revelation comes responsibility for change and, above all, they do not want change. They demand lives as thin and narrow as the white lines along the road which so comfort and mesmerize them, and are content with surfaces, asking for no more. Thus they idolize Negroes as romantic and carefree children, seeing in the ghetto not the reality of poverty and oppression, but freedom from responsibility and, hence, joy.

Sal and his friends are not seeking or celebrating self, but are rather fleeing from identity. For all their solipsism, they are almost egoless. They do not dwell on the self, avoid thinking or feeling. They run from selfdefinition, for to admit the complex existence of the self is to admit its contingencies: the claims of others, commitments to society, to oneself. Solipsism rather than an enhancement of self is for them a loss of self, for the self is projected until it loses all boundaries and limits and, hence, all definition. Sal in the Mexican jungle completely loses his identity; inside and outside merge, he becomes the atmosphere, and as a result knows neither the jungle nor himself. For Sal and Dean, transcendentalism, like drugs, sex, liquor, and even jazz, leads not to enlightenment but to selfobliteration. Erasing both ego and world, nothing remains save motion and sensation, passive, self-effacing and mechanical. Only the sheer impetus of their frantic, speeding cars holds their scattered selves together.

Their selves have no definition and their lives no continuity. Nothing is related, neither self nor time; there is no cause and effect, life is not an ongoing process. Rather, there is only the Eternal Now, the jazz moment, which demands absolutely nothing. Their ideals are spontaneity and impulse because both are independent of relation to what has gone before and what may come after. Spontaneity and impulse are the ethic of disjunction, recognizing neither limit, liability or obligation. Their emphasis on spontaneity is a measure of their fear of life. In their cars they are suspended from life and living, as if in a capsule hurtling coast-to-coast above the earth. They seek out not truth nor values but this encapsulated almost fetal existence as an end in itself, an end that is much like death.

For even their much touted ideal of Freedom is in reality a freedom from life itself, especially from rational, adult life with its welter of consequences and obligations. Dean is utterly free because he is completely mad. He has defied maturity and logic, defied time with its demands that he grow up to responsibility. Like Nietzsche's superman, he is beyond good and evil, blame and expectation, nor must he justify his existence through work and duty, a state Sal sorely admires: Bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness— everything was behind him, and ahead of him was the ragged and ecstatic joy of pure being. Sal's own longing for freedom is embodied in a mysterious Shrouded Traveler, a figure who unites the road and death. In many avatars, he pursues Sal in his headlong flight down the highway, offering, through solitary travel, the lost bliss which is the death of the self: The one thing that we yearn for in all our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that we probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death.

Free love is rather freedom from love and another route down that same dark deathwish. For Sal the lovebed is the deathbed, where he goes to obliterate himself and to find the safe lost bliss of the womb, blindly seeking to return the way he came. But Sal is only able to find this particular version of lost bliss when he has reduced his partner to the nonthreatening role of fellow child. He has trouble succeeding with adult women; he fills Rita with nothing but talk and is convinced Theresa is a whore until he discovers with relief that she is only a baby, as fragile and vulnerable as he:

I saw her poor belly where there was a Caesarian scar; her hips were so narrow she couldn't bear a child without getting gashed open. Her legs were like little sticks. She was only four foot ten. I made love to her in the sweetness of the weary morning. Then, two tired angels of some kind, hung-up forlornly in an LA shelf, having found the closest and most delicious thing in life together, we fell asleep …..

Sex here is not a wild explosion but the desperate, gentle solace two babes in the woods haltingly offer each other…. Sal says he ought to be seeking out a wife, but his true search is, as is Dean's, not for lover but for father, for someone to shelter him from life and responsibility. He turns to Terry not for ecstasy or even sensation, but as a respite from his search, an escape from the demands of life: I finally decided to hide from the world one more night with her and morning be damned.

In short, for all their exuberance, Kerouac's characters are half in love with easeful death. And this Sal Paradise and his creator well know. Neither is deceived about the nature of beat existence. Kerouac is able to step back from his characters to point out their follies; to show, for example, Dean's pathetic justification of life on the road… . Sal himself is able to articulate his own fear of feeling and responsibility and his resultant, overwhelming emptiness:

Well, you know me. You know I don't have close relationships with anybody anymore. I don't know what to do with these things. I hold things in my hand like pieces of crap and don't know where to put it down… . It's not my fault! It's not my fault! ….. Nothing in this lousy world is my fault, don't you see that? I don't want it to be and it can't be and it won't be.

He realizes that he has nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion, and marks the deaths of his various illusions with the refrain, Everything is collapsing.

Kerouac further points out that the shortcomings of his characters parallel the shortcomings of the country to which they are so intimately connected. Kerouac's response to America is typically disillusioned. America is a land of corruption and hypocrisy, promising everything and delivering nothing, living off the innocence and opportunity, the excitement and adventure of the past. In particular Kerouac indicts America for failing to provide his searching characters with any public meaning or communal values to counteract the emptiness of their private lives. Sal looks to America much as he looks to Dean, to provide him with direction, purpose and meaning, to offer him a straight line, an ordered progression to a golden destination, an IT of stability and salvation. But IT never materializes, and the straight line itself becomes an end; the going, the road, is all. Dean's response to continual disillusionment is to forsake the destination for the journey: Move! Sal follows his leader but eventually becomes disgusted with the purposeless, uncomfortable jockeying from coast to coast, just as he becomes disgusted with Dean. Unlike Dean, Sal is able to recognize and identify his despair and, ultimately, to act on the causes of it; where for Dean change is merely deterioration, Sal undergoes true development.
In addition to Sal's growing insight, Kerouac equips his narrator with a double vision, enabling Sal to comment on the people and events of the novel as he saw them when they happened, and as he views them now that they are over, a sadderbutwiser hindsight which acts as a check upon his naive, undiscriminating exuberances and provides a disillusioned alternative view of the beatifics of the beat generation.

While the younger Sal idolized Dean upon first meeting him, the older Sal reminds the reader that this is all far back, when Dean was not "the way he is today …..," and notes that the whole mad swirl of everything that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American night. He observes the sad effect of Time upon his old friends who once rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later becomes so much sadder and perceptive and blank. He corrects himself when his earlier view of Dean intrudes upon the more precise voice of his older self: Dean … had finished his first fling in New York. I say fling, but he only worked like a dog in parking lots. Sal continually checks and repudiates his youthful self, and deflates his naive view of Dean and life on the road: I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age; and a little bit of trouble or even Dean's eventual rejection of me as a buddy, putting me down, as he would later, on starving sidewalks and sickbeds—what did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off.

Sal's double vision does more than correct his impulses. It projects the reader forward in time and provides the sense of continuity the disjunctive characters, including the younger Sal, lack. This older voice offers relations and connections, causes and effects, connects past with present and projects into the future. It firmly anchors reader and narrator to the familiar world of change and conjunction. It knows the discrepancy between appearance and reality and realizes sadly that Time eventually captures even frantically speeding children. It is the view of a man who has, in Dean Moriarty's words, come to know Time, it prepares the reader for Sal's eventual disillusionment with beat life and the sordid hipsters of America.

Sal's double vision is proof of his eventual recapitulation to time and change, a recapitulation which he battles for most of the novel. It is this battling, perhaps, so constant and monotonous, which has infuriated readers used to traditional novels of development and makes them wonder, indeed, whether anything happens to anyone in the novel at all. Sal alone of the characters continually perceives the futility and insanity of his journeys, yet continually makes them, always with the same childlike innocence and expectation, always to follow the same pattern of hopefulness ending in disillusionment as he learns and relearns the same weary lessons about America and Dean Moriarty. Nonetheless, Sal does finally accept the obligations of his insights and revelations, decides to bear the heavy weight of change and responsibility, and grows up to understand, evaluate and finally repudiate Dean Moriarty, the American Dream, and life on the road.

Dean offers Sal more than direction and meaning; he simultaneously provides both a quest and an escape, a hiatus from adult life and adult feelings, a moratorium on maturity. Sal associates Dean with his own childhood: "… he reminded me of some longlost brother …, made me remember my boyhood…... And in his excited way of speaking I heard again the voices of old companions and brothers under the bridge… ."

Indeed, although Sal is older than Dean, he regards Dean at first not so much as long lost brother but as Father whom he passively follows, trusting to be protected, loved and directed. Sal is disenchanted with Dean at the end of Part Two not because Dean has proven himself a poor friend, but because he has turned out to be yet another bad father: Where is Dean and why isn't he concerned about our welfare?

Sal's emotional maturation is evident in his first lover's quarrel with Dean. Enraged by Dean's casual reference to his growing old (You're getting a little older now), Sal turns on him, reducing him to tears, but immediately afterwards realizes that his anger is directed at aging rather than at Dean: I had flipped momentarily and turned it down on Dean. He takes responsibility for hurting Dean, and apologizes to him, humbly and lovingly: Remember that I believe in you. I'm infinitely sorry for the foolish grievance I held against you… . He sees that his present anger springs from sources buried in his youth (Everything I had ever secretly held against my brother was coming out ….. ). This insight into himself helps him to understand Dean, who is, like him, mired in a past whose anger and frenzy he is compelled to act out, but, unlike Sal, without benefit of apology or insight: "All the bitterness and madness of his entire Denver life was blasting out of his system like daggers. His face was red and sweaty and mean." Regarding his friend without desperate idealism, Sal sees that Dean's frantic moving and going is not a romantic quest for adventure or truth but is instead a sad, lost circling for the past, for the home and the father he never had. He sees that both he and Dean are as frightened and lost as the Prince of Dharma, going in circles in the dark lost places between the stars, searching for that lost ancestral grove. The road on which they run is all that old road of the past unreeling dizzily as if the cup of life had been overturned and everything gone mad. My eyes ached in nightmare day. True to his vow, he takes Dean back to New York with him, yet knows that for them a permanent home is impossible. Their marriage breaks down; Dean returns to his crazy welter of wives and children, Sal to his aunt and his disillusionment.

In Mexico Sal hopes to escape from the self, civilization, and their discontents. At the bottom of his primitivism is a desire to confront the primal sources of pure being, to discover life as it was— shapeless, formless, dark—before being molded into self or society; in short, to find once and for all the womb he has been seeking all his life. If nothing else, he hopes to search out his final, true and ultimate parents among the Indians who are the source of mankind and the fathers of it.

But the strange Arabian paradise we had finally found at the end of the hard, hard road is only a wild old whore house after all. The Indians are coming down from the mountains drawn to wristwatches and cities. They and the Mexicans welcome Sal and Dean not as brothers or fellow children, but as American tourists to be exploited. The brothel where they converse for their ultimate mindand timeblowing fling is a sad, frantic, desperate place, full of eighteenyearold drunks and child whores, sinking and lost, writhing and suffering…. Their great primitive playground is no more than a sad kiddy park with swings and a brokendown merrygoround … in the fading red sun…. And in that sad kiddy park Sal leaves behind his faith in the possibility of an infantile paradise and, with it, his faith in Dean.

Dean first induced Sal to accompany him over the border with the happy announcement that ….. the years have rolled severally behind us and yet you see none of us have really changed… . In Mexico Sal finds this denial of time not a reprieve but a condemnation. Dean cannot change and he cannot rest, not even in the great and final wild uninhibited Fellahin childlike Mexico City. Wedded forever to his terrible, changeless compulsions, not the love of his friend nor the possibility of paradise can stay him from his rounds. He leaves the delirious and unconscious Sal to return to all that again, for, as he himself announces, the road drives me. Sal understands and pities him ("I realized what a rat he was, but … I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes"), realizing his friend is the least free of anyone. Dean leads not a primitive life of spontaneity and instinct but instead a sorry, driven existence of joyless sweats and anxieties. Sal has a vision of Dean not as sweet, holy goof but as the Angel of Death, burning and laying waste whatever he touches….

Returning to America, Sal meets up once more with the Shrouded Traveler, a symbol of the fatal lure of the road and the restless, nomadic beat life. Sal wonders if this tall old man with flowing white hair ….. with a pack on his back is a sign that I should at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America. He wonders, in short, if he ought to become the Ghost of the Susquehanna, to enter the darkness from which the old man appeared and into which he vanished. He responds to the romance of this suggestion, but is haunted by its loneliness. Later, in New York, he calls out his name in the darkness and is answered by Laura, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. Settling his dreams of paradise and salvation in her, he gives up the road.

In a sense, Sal's growth as an adult can be measured through his responses to Dean and in the changing aspects of their relationship. Sal moves from idolatry to pity, from a breathless, childlike worship of Dean as alternately Saint and Father, to a realization of Dean's own tortured humanity, marked by Sal's attempt to be brother, then Father, to his friend, sensitive to Dean's needs without melodrama, facing responsibility and decision, allowing himself to feel blame and love, yet, eventually, for the sake of his own soul, rejecting, deliberately and sadly, his lost, perpetually circling friend.
When Dean arrives to rescue him once more from the world of age and obligation, Sal refuses to go. He discards Dean's plan to leave for San Francisco before he himself is absolutely ready (But why did you come so soon, Dean?), and, deciding that he wasn't going to start all over again ruining [Remi's] planned evenings as I had done ... in 1947, he pulls away from Dean and leaves him behind.

In the course of his scattered journeys Sal has learned, perhaps to his regret, what rather tentatively might indeed finally matter, and to this tenuous value he cautiously decides to commit himself, giving up the ghost of the Shrouded Traveler, of Dean Moriarty and Old Dean Moriarty and dead America, and accepting in their place feeling, responsibility, and roots—not in a place but in another person, Laura. Sal's relationship with Dean has served as an apprenticeship during which he has learned how to accommodate to intimacy, as his disillusionment with America has prepared him to look beyond the road for salvation and paradise. Neither America nor Dean can successfully order his life, provide him with direction or meaning. Neither can father him; ultimately, he must father himself, must look inward for purpose and belief. For America has lost her innocence and her sense of purpose just as Dean has and, like Dean, is continually making bogus attempts to pretend it still has all the potential and grace of its youth… .

On the Road ends with an elegy for a lost America, for the country which once might have been the father of us all, but now is only the land where they let children cry. Dean Moriarty is himself America, or rather the dream of America, once innocent, young, full of promise and holiness, bursting with potential and vitality, now driven mad, crippled, impotent (We're all losing our fingers), ragged, dirty, lost, searching for a past of security and love that never existed, trailing frenzy and broken promises, unable to speak to anybody anymore.

Source: Carole Gottlieb Vopat, "Jack Kerouac's On the Road: A Reevaluation," in Midwest Quarterly, Vol. XIV, No. 4, Summer, 1973, pp. 385-407.

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