Thesis Paper Post 3

Both Sal and Dean set off on the epic journeys searching for the same thing, the true meaning of happiness, but unfortunately with every step Sal and Dean take they are met with disappointment. When Sal finally makes it to Colorado and the group has already begun to fall apart and his idol, Dean Moriarty, rarely notices or speaks to Sal. As Sal is leaving Colorado, on his way to San Francisco, he remarks that “In a last minute phone call Dean said he and Carlo might join me on the cost; I pondered this, and realized I hadn’t talked to Dean for more than five minutes on the whole time” (I.10.12).

Sal’s expectations are, quickly and in an anticlimactic fizzle, not met, which eventually takes a severe toll on Sal’s initial optimism and excitement. As Sal reaches the end of his first journey across the continental U.S. he realizes “How disastrous all this was compared to what I’d written him from Paterson, planning my red line Route 6 across America. Here I was at the end of America - no more land - and now there was nowhere to go but back. I determined at least to make my trip a circular one: I decided then and there to go to Hollywood and back through Texas to see my bayou gang; then the rest be damned.” (I.11.96). Sal is disappointed by the fact that he has reached the end, with no more land to head west on, and has not found what he is looking for. But, as with Dean, Sal believes that as long as they are on the road there is a chance of them finding what they are looking for.

Through the deration of the entire novel there is always something frustratingly missing from Sal’s descriptions of the people around him and of his life in general, as if he can not get an accurate understanding it. He travels through all of the United States hoping to find someone who can help him understand it, which is another reason why Sal is drawn to Dean. After coming back from the West Coast for the first time Sal is stranded in New York City is left with no other option than walking through the Lincoln Tunnel to get back to New Jersey. During his journey Sal remarks, “Can you picture me walking those last miles through the Lincoln Tunnel or over the Washington Bridge and into New Jersey? It was dusk. Where was Hassel? I dug the square for Hassel; he wasn’t there, he was in Riker’s Island, behind bars. Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life? I had my home to go to, my place to lay my head down and figure the losses and figure the gain that I knew was in there somewhere too” (I.14.9).

Sal starts to realize how everyone around him feels as he does, that his perspective is not as unique as he had believe. During his journey back to New York he claims, “The bus roared on. I was going home in October. Everybody goes home in October.” (I.14.1).

Comment On Ari's Post (Meagan Adler)

I think that your paper is very strong and is able to skillfully express your own opinion on On the Road with strong support.  I think that your attention to detail is particularly captivating because it strengthens your overall idea.  I also like how you utilize a historical perspective in expressing your idea.  Your use of language is very sophisticated and makes for a strong paper.  I think that the writing is well thought out and organized and that your topic is very well supported.  I love your paper and cannot wait to read the last part of it! 

Part 3- Lemon Squeezers

    Social movements such as the beat generation are used as a tool that allows society to further believe in a false idea of progression and advancement of the human race; but also, even to Kerouac’s dissatisfaction, his movement, and his book On The Road, illustrate to readers that no matter how much humanity ‘progresses’, it will still indulge in a pool of selfish lemon squeezers.
    This new ‘Beat Generation’ is a direct descendant of the hippies. Their beliefs include the rejection of mainstream American values, exploring alternate forms of sexuality (homosexuality), and experimentation with drugs. The new ‘revolution’ forced Kerouac to play his hand which eventually lead to his separation from the movement. This shocking act can be explained through the term lemon squeezers. Lemon squeezers are defined to be people who metaphorically squeeze everything sweet and useful out of someone and when all dried up, dump those people in the trash similar to what humans do with lemons. To Kerouac, the new Beatniks were parasites of his movement and where in essence doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons.
    In the end, history has proven that the human race falls under one denominator of selfishness. People will go to great lengths in order to preserve and protect their beliefs and ideals. The question that comes from this is do people truly need their beliefs like race and gender?
    Simply, the answer to this question is no. The power of social constructions, “an idea or phenomenon that does not exist in nature but is created and given meaning by people”, is quite powerful. Within the exchanges between people, they develop the social value of power. In this expression, people come to believe in the necessity of ideas like money and war.
    To further this argument in the invention of ideas for the sake of selfishness such as the idea of the dinosaur. In the quest of explaining all the ins and outs of this world, the concept of a dinosaur is something that people have constructed over time. Even in the face of something real, this philosophy stating that every human beings actions are selfish would invite people to question if dinosaurs existed simply because of the fossil. Metaphysically, one could argue the dinosaur is real only because the human made it. In fact, eliminating it would not violate a law of nature. Or, on the other hand, the epistemic argument suggests that humans continue to believe in the dinosaur because of the role it plays in socially. The belief itself subserves a social purpose.
    Tying this idea together with the theme of selfishness is the idea of murder. For generations human beings have been taught that murdering is wrong. This ideal, proving to be yet another social construction, serves a social purpose for population control and self preservation tendency because people do not want to be murdered. Peoples’ beliefs are shaped on  what they truly want and desire for this world. Human beings safety would be challenged if murdering was allowed, and as a result, now, it is condemned and outcasted.

Part 3 of Term Paper (Meagan Adler)

In addition to the ways in which family and state interfere with the freedom of the individual, throughout On the Road, it is evident that church also interferes with it.  The institution of church implements itself within the Beat culture; for example, Sal sees Dean as his God.  Sal expresses, ““Dean completely amazed me… He passed me like the wind.  As we ran I had a mad vision of Dean running through all of life just like that- his bony face outthrust to life, his arms pumping, his brown sweating…” (pg.143).  Here, the reader is exposed to Sal’s admiration for Dean that makes Dean become Sal’s role model throughout his journey on the road.  Sal also calls Dean the “HOLY GOOF” (pg.183) and “the holy-con man” (pg.202), which shows that the institution of religion has interfered with the true freedom of the individual.  Sal expresses, “In myriad pricklings of heavenly radiation I had to struggle to see Dean’s figure, and he looked like God” (pg.272).  This illusion that Sal has throughout the novel emphasizes the institution of religion that limits his own freedom as an individual.  Lastly, he says, ““As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, ‘Pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven’” (pg.171).  This furthermore emphasizes that the Beat Generation resembles a religious group that captures Sal.  This indicates that Sal cannot be an individual, for he has conformed the almost religious culture of the Beat Generation.  He explicitly states that he wants to follow and that he does not want to lead; this sacrifices the true purpose of the individual. 

Throughout Sal and Dean’s cyclical journey, the reader is able to see how society prevents the growth of the individual through the fringes of society.  The fringes are the poor, homeless, and lowlifes of society that are meant to threaten the individual and draw him/her back in.  Whenever Sal sees the fringes of society he turns back home.  This shows that his journey to become an individual ultimately fails because society wins.  Society purposefully allows these people on the fringes to exist to pull the rebellious people back. Sal dejectedly expresses, “I realized I was beginning to cross and recross towns in America as though I were a traveling salesman- raggedy travelings, bad stock, rotten beans in the bottom of my bag of tricks, nobody buying” (pg.234).  Here, he becomes dissatisfied and discouraged on his journey and wants to go back to society.  Also, he has a conversation with Dean in which Sal says, “You mean we’ll end up old bums?” and Dean responds, “Why not man? Of course we will if we want to, and all that.  There’s no harm ending that way.  You spend your whole life of noninterference with the wished of others, including politicians and the rich, and nobody bothers you, and you cut along and make your own way’” (pg.239).  

Actually Doing Work Right Now

            The idea of the “American Dream” is as flexible as it is abstract and broad, it then follows that this concept has changed over time. Today perhaps some might say the American Dream is coming into this country with nothing and following your dreams to success, but it has not always been so individualistic. At one time, shortly after WWII, the American Dream was the nuclear family- Mom, Pop, Timmy, Sally, their dog Sparky and their white picket fence. This was the image that everyone was expected to aspire to. Unfortunately, this is the 1950’s, so this image was not exactly all-inclusive; portrayals of this American Dream were all quite similar to things like “Leave It to Beaver” in that it only included what was considered the majority at the time, which was, in short, white Americans. Therefore it obviously did not include minorities of any kind, non-heterosexuals, the poor, or generally anyone who did not conform to that particular image. This American Dream was great for that “majority” but obviously it did not work out for that leftover “minority”, or for anyone who dared to question the moral majority. So, of course, a counter-culture emerged; not necessarily made up of minorities, in fact the most famous members of this counter-culture were a group of white males who simply did not want to settle for the Levittown house and the morality they have been told to accept. This group of white males eventually named their counter-culture the “Beat Generation”- a title with a bit of a contested origin. To this day there are those who claim that famous writer Jack Kerouac thought of the name but he himself passes credit to writer Herbert Huncke, claiming that “Beat” came from the idea of being “tired” or “beaten down” as that is how they perceived themselves. Despite this, Allan Ginsberg, another Beat writer, has written that Kerouac called it “a beat generation” first- “not meaning to name the generation, but to unname it”.            The whole point of this movement was not just to explore what had been demonized by society, but it was more about exactly what the name implied; the Beats were all about representing the ideas that had been beaten down. This was a time where a man having his hair too long or acting in such a way that middle-aged white Christian men would not typically approve of was not just strange but quite dangerous. The Beats were the people before the hippies, they were anti-conformists bent on exploring what they have been told should not be explored. They experimented sexually when society told them they could only be heterosexual, they smoked marijuana when society said drugs are evil, and they kept moving even though society said they should just settle down. That is exactly what Jack Kerouac tried to capture in his book “On the Road”, what is essentially his written recollection of a journey with other Beats. It can be argued that nothing happens in the whole book- they are all just constantly moving towards a perceived destination but it never seems too important, they are just on the road. That was the whole point- that is what the Beats were all about- they were kind of just on the move, enjoying their lives, whatever that meant to them, with no particular goals in mind. While perhaps today we can assign these kinds of people other titles and say they are not so unusual, at the time this was some mind-blowing behavior, and the fact the “On the Road” captures this unusual, nearly aimless behavior so well is what makes it such an important book.

Thesis Paper Post 2

Sal leaves the simple and normal life of living in suburban New Jersey to explore the wild and unruly west. Sal does so because he wants his life to be extraordinary, which is why he is drawn to people like Dean and disconnected from his brother and his family, which is shown in Sal’s declaration that “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”. His expectations for what lies ahead of him in Colorado and beyond are huge, which is seen as he departs on his first trip to travel across the United States. As Sal heads west for the first time he describes he describes his reaction as, “here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up. Rock Island - railroad tracks, shacks, small downtown section; and over the bridge to Davenport, same kind of town, all smelling of sawdust in the warm midwest sun” (I.3.3). When Sal writes “Now I could see Denver looming ahead of me like the Promised Land, way out there beneath the stars, across the prairie of Iowa and the plains of Nebraska, and I could see the greater vision of San Francisco beyond, like jewels in the night” his belief that the expansiveness of the United States as a source of hope in finding the hidden key to living happily is most clearly shown, specifically in his comparison to each city as a gem. Dean like Sal is searching for a greater meaning to life. The reader learns more of Dean’s past then they do for Sal, and this is done for a specific reason. Dean’s childhood and early adulthood consisted of two polar themes: instability and confinement. He traveled by freight car with his homeless father, only to end up incarcerated as young adult. Dean goes from complete freedom to being caged, which is why, once he is released, that Dean goes mad. As they are traveling, Dean tells Sal “Prison is where you promise yourself the right to live.” (III, 3). Like Sal, his affinity for the freedom, represented by the immense size of the United States, stems from optimism in that they can find happiness if they just look hard enough. This ideal is also the base for their counter-culturalism. Both Sal and Dean reject what was the popular idea of happiness during the 1940’s, the era in which “On the Road” was based. They embodied the discontent felt by the youths. Sal expresses his demanding need rebel from his family and tradition when he writes “Although my aunt warned me that he would get me in trouble, I could hear a new call and see a new horizon, and believe it at my young age” (I.1.17). The youths of Beat Generation, like many other generations, drank alcohol, took drugs, had sex before marriage, and traveled through life aimlessly without any goals because they had been told not to. They abandon the lives they had been told was “right” and set off on grand journeys to find out for themselves how to live. Their expectations were so high; they went mad trying to fulfill them.

Comment on Meagan's (Ari Garvett)

    I am quite fond of the compare and contrast method that you have stylized in your paper. It is in a sense, a sort of tease to your readers. One minute your present the utopian idea of a wonderful free spirited place, and the next you slice that with the knife with your introduction of the institutions. This affect I believe is a crucial element to your paper as it illustrates the cruelties that the three pillars are made of. In light of lasts week's post as well I believe your paper is flowing quite nicely and everything is connected which I believe is a hard task as your topic is quite expansive. You manage to hone in this idea while keeping your readers intrigued. So far, so good!

Comment on Ari's Post (Meagan Adler)

I think that your term paper is very well researched.  I particularly like how you give so much detail about Kerouac’s background and incorporate his ideologies within the paper.  Your emphasis on the Beat Generation’s relationship to the hippies is particularly intriguing.  I like that the paper focuses on the idea that social movements, such as the Beat Generation “are used as a tool that allows society to further believe in a false idea of progression and advancement of the human race”.  Your attention to detail is great! I think that your topic is very interesting and that it makes a really strong paper!