“We wandered around, carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets. Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra…a lemon lot, and how’s a man going to make a living with a gang like that?” (Meagan Adler)

      As we continue to aimlessly wander with the “foolish gang” (pg.155) as they again head back west on their cyclical and seemingly never ending journey, we continue to see them attempting to escape the inescapable societal institutions.  We see these societal interferences when the cop “whipped out his gun” (pg.154) and demanded them to keep their hands up; here, we see that the institution of state acts as an inescapable authoritative force that will continue to follow Dean and his clan throughout the country.  Society acts as a restrictive roof, as Sal says, “it’s the too-huge world vaulting us” (pg.146) in which he tries to say the impossible “good-by” (pg.146).  We also see the societal institution of family haunting Sal as he imaginatively sees and hears his 1750 “strange Dickensian mother” (pg.161) saying “‘don’t come back and plague your honest, hard-working mother.  You are no longer like a son to me’” (pg.161); we again see society pulling Sal back to it’s socially acceptable ways.  In this week’s reading, we also see emotionally conflicted feelings from Sal towards Dean in which at one moment he admirably expresses “Dean took the wheel and carried us clear to the top of the world” (pg.157) and the next moment he begrudgingly says, “Where is Dean and why isn’t he concerned about our welfare? I lost faith in him that year” (pg.161); this shows us that Sal so desperately wants to be Dean, for he feels a sense of invincibility and individuality when he is with him, but also sees that he is a societal low-life who will forever aimlessly wander in a purposeless pursuit of freedom.  Furthermore, I think Sal is mentally conflicted with the idea of whether he wants to be the socially accepted conformist or the rebelliously disobedient individual.  A particularly powerful part of this week’s reading was when Sal decides, because “Dean didn’t care one way of the other” (pg.167) that “It was the end” (pg.167) and that he wanted to get out.  Sal expresses, “We wandered around, carrying our bundles of rags in the narrow romantic streets.  Everybody looked like a broken-down movie extra, a withered starlet; disenchanted stunt-men, midget auto-racers, poignant California characters with their end-of-the-continent sadness, handsome, decadent, Casanova-ish men, puffy-eyed motel blondes, hustlers, pimps, whores, masseurs, bellhops- a lemon lot, and how’s a man going to make a living with a gang like that?” (pg.159).  I feel like Sal, once again, sees the hopeless fringes of society and retreats back to live under his societal roof where he will be the socially accepted New York conformist as he apathetically expresses, “We were all thinking we’d never see one another again and we didn’t care” (pg.167).