Off the Road

      So what I just recently realized is that On the Road is not a novel about a very annoying and frustrating boy traveling back and forth across America, it is a novel about trying to find happiness. When I first started reading On the Road I was so confused by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. I could not figure out why they acted the way they did, why they deliberately went against what people expected and wanted from them and at times deliberately tried to mess with their own lives. Sal and Dean have so many opportunities throughout the novel to have a happy and normal life, but they never take them, and at first that made me so mad and infuriated, but as I have already said, I have figured out something new about the novel and that is that On the Road is about happiness. More specifically, one’s own happiness, not society’s or your parent’s idea of happiness, but trying to find your own happiness. That is exactly what Sal and Dean are trying to do. 

      There is a lot that is left out about both the characters for most of the novel. Sal is living with his aunt and relies off his aunt for the entire novel, yet we never really hear about what happened to or where his parents are and it is not until the middle of the novel that we learn that he had been a soldier, or at least what I would assume considering that he goes to school off of the GI bill. I am not an expert in history but I am relatively sure that in order to go to school under the GI bill one must have fought as a soldier for America. Yet Sal never comments about or describes his experiences. We know for almost the entire novel that Dean had spent some time in jail, and yet, like Sal, we never hear anything about his experiences. But I think that both of these experiences have a huge impact on the characters and why act and carry themselves the way they do. I think that Dean is constantly so manic during the earlier parts of the novel because he went from traveling around the country riding on open trains with his father to being locked up. He lost all of his freedom and when he was given it back he went crazy and what I would say, he became absolutely high on it. Towards the end of the novel I think that Dean loses his enthusiasm because he started to realize that he was still trapped, even outside of jail he could not find real freedom.