One of the things that Sal has done best in this novel is traveling. Other than New Jersey, Sal has not been able to stay in one place for long; he has spent most of the novel running. I think that he is running so that he doesn’t give himself enough time to think. He is scared of himself and his mistakes and is refusing to face the guilt that comes along with facing reality. He knows that this has been a sorry excuse of experiencing the West, and has instead been a collection of meaningless experiences that have actually had no affect on him.
There’s an aspect of Sal that hasn’t really been addressed, that he has idealized from the beginning of the novel the idea of the West, and yet while traveling he has hung out only with those who he knew from the East cost. He has done very little to immerse himself in the Western culture. He has mostly done the opposite; instead, he has insulted, stolen from, and threatened the locals, the people actually from the West.
A lot of the group members have talked about how they were surprised by the flow of the novel, that they were used to the beginning and conclusion of a chapter marking the beginning and conclusion of a new idea and that On the Road does not following this rule. I recently read that the original manuscript of On the Road was one fifty-foot long roll of paper. I don’t think that Kerouac wanted the reader to feel the same lack of order and reason that Sal and his friends were living their lives by. How their decisions are made on a whim, and that they carelessly float through their lives. It would be at least somewhat honorable if it made them happy, but they just feel nothing.
I too agree that Sal has idealized this western world but has done almost nothing to genuinely immerse himself in its culture. Whether it is stealing, threatening, or insulting the locals, we definitely see Sal as that closed minded tourist figure that is easily molded by his friends from the East coast. He sees San Francisco more like a “Western movie” (pg.59) than part of his reality. Are we starting to get slightly annoyed with Sal’s mundanely dull character? He says, “This is the story of America. Everybody’s doing what they think they’re supposed to do” (pg.62). Sal shows us that what he thinks he is supposed to do is that in which his friends such as Remi do. He sees “everybody in America” as a “natural-born thief” (pg.65) and furthermore conforms to be one of these thieves. I found it particularly interesting how Gioia mentioned that the original manuscript was one fifty-foot long roll of paper, which makes us understand why the novel seems to flow so well. Although I think that Sal is somewhat boring and becoming less and less likeable and relatable, I think that Kerouac’s skillful and smooth flow of writing is admirable, for we feel like we are on this continuous journey with the rose on the Hudson River he metaphorically describes in chapter 2. However, this continuous flow is somewhat disrupted by the fact that Sal cannot go any further west and has to turn back to New Jersey. It is through his journey backwards, trying to follow his own steps, that Sal will find his true identity?
ReplyDelete- Meagan Adler