“Isn’t it true that you start your life as a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life” (Meagan Adler)

        As Sal “haggardly” (pg.97) stumbles through the “inky night” (pg.96) on his journey back home, we unquestionably doubt if he will ever be able to become the Dean-like figure he so desperately wishes to be.  In worshipping his “God” (pg.105), Dean, Sal “sheepishly” (pg.105) follows him on his second attempt to escape the societal restrictions that force conformity and ultimately lead to the failure of himself becoming the individual that he sees in Dean.  Sal is captivated by Dean’s rebellious individualism in which he is unworriedly able to abandon his family back home for Marylou because he rejects the familial institution.  Sal craves the road life of the mobile Beat generation because he feels as if he is trapped in the “whiteness of the tomb” (pg.98), restricted by the institution of his own home.  Although mentally Sal longs to break free from society and become one of the sheep that follows the rebellious youth into Dean’s world, I am not sure if he has what it takes to remain apart from the societal institutions, for I think that he has already failed as an individual.   Sal augments our doubts about him being able to break free from society when he says, “This can’t go on all the time-all this franticness and jumping around.  We’ve got to go someplace, find something” (pg.108).  This shows us that Sal has been manipulated by society to a point where he feels the need to be complacently bound to societal institutions, such as a wife and family.  I feel as if Sal will always be that “ghost” (pg.97) he tries to run away from.  A powerful part of this week’s reading, where Sal sees society for what it really is, is when he says, “Isn’t it true that you start your life as a sweet child believing in everything under your father’s roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life”  (pg.97).   Sal conveys the grotesquely dark force of the societal institutions that relentlessly pull at the individuals who try to escape. I think that he realizes that he is trying to escape an inescapable distorted world that will haunt him and make him a ghost, whether he is in the east or the west.  Sal dreams of becoming this changed person to escape the nightmares of his life in which he sees himself conforming to as he remains trapped under a societal roof.  He sees the “semi-respectable walking hobo” (pg.97) on the fringes of society and feels the need to rush back home because he does not want that to be himself.  As he naively wanders back on a second journey, I think that Sal again will be threatened by the fringes of society and frantically come back the mundanely dull ghost he left as.