This week my perspective on the novel transitioned dramatically. At first, I admired Sal’s child like spirit. His innocent dreams of exploring the “promised land” rejuvenated the meaning of life and was a nice shift from Atlas Shrugged. His vision of the people and places that surrounded his made Earth seem like a real live heaven through his use of adjectives. All objects that he observed were incredible, the sweetest, and the best. I even took compassion with that naiveness that he possesses because his righteous dreams were one in a million.
Reading the next two chapters pained me. In the narrative, Sal becomes an old miserable drunk who cannot take care of himself, let a lone a family whom he comes to adopt as to fulfill his longing for a sense of closeness. His constant moving from the east to the west, and now from the west to the south represents his idea that the world is a stale, disgusting, and dull place to live. He is under the belief that place creates all his troubles, when in reality, it is Sal that morphs his surroundings, and therefore destroys place. There is one common factor that Sal has yet to realize is the source of all his troubles. Sal destroys himself through his constant restlessness, anxiety, and tendency to turn to substances like alcohol and drugs to ease the pain. As they are only temporary tools of medication, Sal needs to learn to face his problems head on rather than continue to move and hitch hike from one location to the next.
The most pathetic scene as of yet is when he decides to go back to New York, the place he hated most. Eastern values at first for Sal included analytical, static, and critical ideas whereas Western values symbolized wild exuberance. However, the values of geography have not changed in the short amount of time that Sal has journeyed, but rather, Sal mistakenly believes that maybe the East can once again provide him with the ‘exuberance’ that he hoped to west could instill in him.
No longer to I have any sympathy for Sal’s character. Once an innocent dreamer, to now becoming a helpless fool I feel as if On The Road is taking a turn for the worse. I do hope that Sal’s once naive personality takes hold of his body once again because as of right now, there is no Salvation for his character in my eyes.
I agree with Ari in relation to a number of his ideas including the fact that Sal has digressed in the novel. Moreover, as I said in my post, I really hope that Sal’s stupidity does not continue because if it does, reading this book is going to be a longgg road (no pun intended). Furthermore, I believe that Kerouac can easily make the novel better by making Sal’s character less of a dumbass and more of an intelligent man. Perhaps I am wrong though, maybe Kerouac will have some brilliant way of pulling this off in the next few chapters, but as of right now, I am fairly disappointed.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I do agree with the idea that Sal’s digression is extremely frustrating, I do not completely agree with the way in which Ari depicts this. Maybe it was not intended, but I felt as if Ari was calling Sal a complete failure. Furthermore, if this is his perspective, I must say that I disagree with him because Sal has been successful in a variety of ways. If someone read Ari’s description of Sal, I could almost guarantee that they would not believe this character could make it cross country by himself. To conclude, I believe that Ari’s characterization of Sal was a bit exaggerated and that Sal is actually a more complex character than the above comment indicates.