Dean

       So Dean is back and he is crazier than ever. Kerouac makes it obvious that Dean is morally corrupt and insane. Dean leaves Camille and his newborn daughter to meet up with a past girlfriend, and his conversation with Sal in the car about his view with God follows absolutely no reason. I question why Sal has decided to join Dean again and the only answer that I have come up with follows the same reasoning as with Meursault in The Stranger. He cannot and refuses to make judgments on other people, and I am just as frustrated with Sal while reading On the Road as I was with Meursault while reading The Stranger. Sal is indifferent to everything and is constantly overlooking Dean's failures. In The Stanger Meursault is created to be an outsider, to be an exception from the norm in order to have something to compare the idea of normal to, more or less questions the idea of normality. But Sal is neither a part of the group nor an outsider. I think I would be less frustrated by Sal he were to just choose a side. I believe the Kerouac wants the reader to feel this way, to hate the main characters of his novel which in the end is a little messed up, but also entertaining.

       During our video conversation a little more than a month ago Felipe made a claim that Sal isn’t necessarily the main character of On the Road, and that Dean would better fall under the title of main character. Up until now I had disagreed with him, but I believe that I now better understand his reasoning. Kerouac is writing On the Road as a representation of the beat generation and I don’t believe that Sal is apart of the group. He will follow them around and sometimes take part in their activities, but I believe that Sal is just means for the reader to observe what Kerouac believes the beat generation to be, and the subject of Sal’s observation is Dean. Dean is Kerouac’s view of the beat generation, and this was not the point of view I was expecting when I started reading On the Road. I was expecting the characters of on the road to be rebels with a new vision of what right and wrong are, but really they are just lost.