When Sal mentions, “everyone goes home in October”(104) I feel that he is really focusing on the end of summer. He is describing the same feeling we all get when the summer ends and the school year starts. The period of time when we have the freedom to stay out all night and we don’t have any responsibilities, such as homework or applications, beckoning us back home, is ending. And for those living with seasons, those feelings of the end of summer are matched by the external world. The leaves change and the sky gets grayer, and we can no longer walk around in shorts and flip-flops. Instead it is we have to wear jackets and pants, and some people unwilling to accept the change in season will actually refuse to wear warmer garments and wait until the last second to admit they need them. For Sal specifically, the end of summer marks the end of the nights he could sleep outside on the lawns of bus stations or riding on the backs of pickup trucks. Once it becomes October, the night begins to get colder and those living up north know that the first freeze is soon. It is now physically be too cold for Sal to continue traveling; or at least too cold to continue traveling in the way he had before.
Chapter fourteen marks the conclusion of the first part of the novel. Sal is now back home and in a completely different situation from the one in which was before. Instead of being in a hut in California living with a dysfunctional couple comprised of a gold digger and a thief his is with his family and surrounded by reasonable people. And yet his still held captive by the pull of Dean. Within his reasoning of deciding whether or not to go with Dean he sees the Christmas tree, the presents, and smells the roasting turkey, and hears his relatives talking in the other room and still he decides to go with Dean. Still he decides join Dean as if he had learned nothing from his last experience. Although this seemed unreasonable to me at first, the more I though about it the more it made sense, specifically the part about Sal listening “to the talk of the relatives” (115). Every holiday that I have spent back in New Jersey after moving to Florida; seeing my cousins and my brother who was enrolled in NYU before we moved, the harder it is to try to relate to them. I actually found it reasonable for Sal to decide to go with Dean because I don’t think he was ready to be home.
I agree with Gioia on nearly every aspect of her post. I too think that the transition between the first and second part of the novel is nearly flawless. In addition, I believe that the dramatic change in settings is done purposefully by Kerouac to illustrate the significantly different experiences that came as a result of Sal’s time “on the road”. As Gioia discusses, Sal’s time in California during the summer compared to the winter in New York is ridiculously different.
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons that I think Kerouac takes the novel’s plot back to New York is to reintroduce the roles of the institutions that we discussed in class. In Gioia’s post, she comments on the fact that in the summer in California Sal could essentially do whatever he pleased. Moreover, it seemed as if there was a lack of a presence of the institutions there. Now in New York however, it is a different story. Specifically, the institution of family comes back into play because Sal still relies on his aunt.
The last aspect of the reading that was discussed in Gioia’s post that I would also like to comment on is the idea that a spatial gap naturally creates a personality gap. In other words, because Sal went out west and had experiences that were impossible to have in New York, his character has also significantly changed. This part of the novel is relatable in the sense that similar to Gioia, I also have relatives outside of Florida that have different personalities based on where they live. I believe that one of Jack Kerouac’s main motives is to address the cultural differences found when “on the road”.