On the Road: The Quest for Happiness (Gioia Kelleher)

Gioia Kelleher

Mr. Judd Shapiro

AP English Literature Period 2

5 May 2014

On the Road: The Quest for Happiness

On the Road takes place after the Great Depression and World War Two, but before the turmoil of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s. The Beat Generation, the movement for which Jack Kerouac represented, are stuck in a grey zone in American history. Allen Ginsberg, a voice among the Jack Kerouac, in a dark and somber poem “Howl”(1995) decries “Robot apartments! Invincible suburbs! Skeletal treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries!”(On the Road). Here Ginsberg describes many of the harsh critiques that the youth shared during the 1950’s, a common feeling of restlessness and alienation. They felt estranged from their middle-class centered lives they had seen their parents lead. They had been told that if they were to follow their parent’s path they were to expect a life of fulfillment and wealth, but in adulthood they were met with neither. Strangely enough, their resentment stems from the prosperity felt by many Americans during the era surrounding the Beat Generation. They were promised by their parents ant their teachers that they would be happy if the followed the steps already created for them by previous generation, but the history they have witnesses would tell them other wise, so instead the tried to find their own path. The Beats represented the counterpart to the rise of the ordinary middle-class behavior, and though their quest for a new way of living life was honorable it in the end, as Kerouac describes in On the Road, did not lead to what they had expected.

It is widely considered that On the Road is partially autobiographical, though this seems inconsequential considering that every piece of art has to be at least somewhat autobiographical of the artist the created it, it is important when analyzing On the Road to understand the life of Jack Kerouac more so than would be required for other novels. In 1947, after the end of World War Two, Kerouac began his cross-country journeys, which would later inspire the novel On the Road. It was during these journeys that he met Neal Cassidy who Kerouac would base the character Dean Moriarty of off, the second protagonist in the novel. John Clellon Holmes, who is best known for his novel “Go”, considered the first Beat author and a friend of Jack Kerouac, is quoted for saying "Everywhere the Beat Generation seems occupied with the feverish production of answers—some of them frightening, some of them foolish—to a single question: how are we to live?".(On the Road) Jack Kerouac first labeled the Beat generation in an interview with Holmes and later quoted him an article in The New York Times Magazine "You know, this is really a beat generation." Though The Beats were unique to their era, the represent a communal conflict that every new generation must deal with. The restlessness of having to balance what previous generation tells you what is right and what you believe is right.

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”(5-6). 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” (13). 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” (14) 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.” (132). 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”(8). 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.

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” (59).

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.” (77-78). 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 cannot 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” (107).

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.” (103).

Even though On the Road is criticized for being a sexist and inaccurate portrayal of women, it does so to express their suffering during the in which Kerouac wrote the novel. Most of the discord stems from many of the main character’s treatment of woman. Characters such as Dean Moriarty at one point in the novel is going back and forth between two hotel rooms in order to sleep with two different women, Marylou and Camille. Though the portrayal of women in On the Road is rough, it is not necessarily incorrect. Kerouac spends a majority of the novel commenting on the journeys and conflicts associated only with Sal, Dean, and their male friends, but female characters do play an important role in the novel. Sal when observing Marylou and Dean’s relationship comments that, “Marylou was watching Dean as she has watched him clear across the country and back, out of the corner of her eye- with a sullen, sad, air…”. (163). The supporting female characters, such as Marylou, Camille, and Terry, are all looking for the same think that the men are, but from the perspective of Sal their intentions and hopes are skewed, purposefully, to look as if they were acting whorish. In the end they are as lost as any of the other male characters.

The subtle change that occurs in the all the characters in On the Road is representative of their slow realization that what they are looking for might not exist. Sal is continuously changing throughout the novel, starting with his first journey across the country during which he was full of exuberance and ending with his surrender to all of the societal ideals he was trying to avoid in the first place. Over time Sal perception of the world changes and his hope in the future is lessened. The same occurs to Sal’s companions such as Dean Moriarty, Carlo Marx, and Marylou. They lose their excitement and passion, and become disillusioned. I believe that Kerouac’s message behind On the Road stems from his characters loss of hope. Kerouac did not write On the Road to tell a story of freedom and the finding of true happiness, but to tell a story about hope that is never fulfilled. Sal on his way through Mexico comments that all of the natives, “had their hands outstretched. They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way”(298). On the Road is a tragedy akin to the likes of Oedipus and Hamlet, just not as dramatic and grand. The most tragic element of the novel is that if anyone could have ended up happy it would have been Sal or Dean. No one else lusted after freedom as much as Sal and Dean did. They went on this epic journey across the United States and beyond, and still they were not able to find happiness. If they couldn’t do it, then who can?

Citation Page

"On the Road." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 05 Apr. 2014. Web. 04 May 2014.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1997. Print.