Characters from the On the Road by Jack Kerouac - Essay Example

?[Your full December 10, “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac Written by Jack Kerouac, the novel “On the Road” features the inattentive and joyous, Dean Moriarty, who has just come out of the jail. He goes to New York, where he meets Sal Paradise, who is a juvenile writer. Dean and Sal go on exploring the country for three years. The journey includes adventurous bus rides and audacious hitchhiking experiences. Sal explores the West of the country with Dean, and also works as a fieldsman in California for around a year. Dean and Sal continue their escapades in the West toward Bull Lee's in New Orleans, and then toward San Francisco. Some time passes, and Dean is shown settling down in New York. He rejoins Sal, and explores the South this time, going to the Mexico City. With a brief summary of the story described here, it is important to mention that the whole journey ended up with a lot of personal development, along with other traces of color and drama that we come across. This paper is an analysis of two characters of the novel: Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. Let’s start off with Sal Paradise. He is the narrator of the story, and is a young writer. He thinks that the East is wrapped up in old fashioned traditions and conventionalities, which make it differ from the West, which contrastingly is liberal, modern, candid, and fresh. These views make him upset with his Beat era’s intellectual, scholarly type, old friends from the East. When he meets Dean, he is very crazed. He is impressed by the liberated western spirit of Dean’s, and wants to enjoy life with and like him, like when he states, “My first impression of Dean was of a young Gene Autry - trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent - a sideburned hero of the snowy West” (Kerouac 5). However, once he sets off to explore the West with Dean, he comes to know about the harsh reality. He comes to know about the drugs, sex, and crime, which prevail in the West. He comes to know about the truth behind the whitewash of the West. And, when he compares the West to the East, he admires the holiness of the East with full heart. Thus, Sal’s whole concept about the West changes over the course of the novel, and he settles down admiring the East and the Beat era all the more. Let’s discuss Sal’s relationship with Dean, his admiration of madness in others, and his newly conceived notions about sex, isolation, and wretchedness, which contribute in his personal development toward the end of the novel. Sal thinks of Dean as the hero belonging to the West, so much so that he forgives Dean’s humiliating actions toward him, like when he leaves Sal starving in San Francisco, and then later on leaves him in Mexico. Sal is not judgmental of Dean. This shows how much he is motivated by him. Sal’s inferiority complex makes him overlook Dean’s insulting actions, and he keeps on considering Dean as his hero. Sal admires the madness that he sees in Dean’s character and in others’ too, like in that of Terry’s brother. Sal wants to be like them, unafraid, carefree, not caring about tomorrow, and not caring about work. He finds out that he cannot be like them, unless and until he is drunk or under the influence of drugs. He says, “Don’t bother me, man, I’m happy where I am” (Kerouac 245). Another interesting point is that Sal measures everything in distance, unlike Dean, who measures everything in time. Where Dean is all the time in a hurry and in a worry to beat time, Sal is in a hurry to cover all distances, and leave none behind unexplored. The reader can sense Sal’s priority of space over time, when he reads about his selling of his watch for gas money in Arizona. Sal says (Kerouac 165): It occurred to me that I had a pocket watch Rocco had just given me for a birthday present, a four-dollar watch. At the gas station I asked the man if he knew a pawnshop in Benson. It was right next door to the station. I knocked, someone got up out of bed, and in a minute I had a dollar for the watch. It went into the tank. Now we had enough gas for Tucson. Sal prefers trading time for the sake of distance, and that has come with spending time with Dean. In the beginning of the novel, it is Sal who is worrying about time, like when he says, “We felt silly and didn’t know what to say, and I for one didn’t want to get hung-up with a carnival. I was in such a bloody hurry to get to the gang in Denver” (Kerouac 23). But, with time spent with Dean, he starts undervaluing his own concept of time to adopt that of Dean’s. Moreover, Sal’s sense of solitude and loneliness goes back to square one when he realizes the truth behind the transient relationships and friendships he does during his journey. He realizes the he can find sadness everywhere. He sees it in the girls he meets, and in the great Mexico City. He realizes the he is not sad alone. Although he finds the love of his life in Terry’s name, he is disappointed with the life of the West, like when he says, “Down in Denver, down in Denver/ all I did was die” (Kerouac 181). So, we see that Sal’s journey and his fascination about Dean turn to be mere fiascos. However, his realization of the importance of his own origins makes his character believable. In contrast to Sal’s depressed and sadistic personality, Dean Moriarty is an open, liberal, and a carefree person, a true depiction of the Western society. Although he turns from holy to “Holy Goof” (Kerouac 194) in Sal’s eyes, for himself he is the pedophilic icon. For Sal, he is the “angel” (Kerouac 315), devil (226), shrouded traveler (449), saint (398), and the greatest of all. Dean is shown as a womanizer, with whom women want to sleep. Men want to be like him. He is the sex-obsessed, drug-addicted person. He looks and feels like a hero, and is not remorseful at all, upon his humiliating and untimely actions. His character is a total mess. He is not concerned about any one, and keeps on moving regardless of circumstances. We see a sort of madness and craziness in Dean’s character, like when Sal says, “He passed me like the wind. As we ran I had a mad vision of Dean running through all of life...” (Kerouac 154). He has been in and out of jail. This may have added to the insanity that shows in his character. He is attracted to pre-pubescent, pubescent, and older girls and women. He is not satisfied with one woman at one time, and his sexual appetite is far beyond his control, so much so that he convinces Sal to have sex with Marylou with him watching. For him, sex is business, as the reader comes to know that he cares for gay men only when he needs money, like when Sal tells about Dean, “…to him sex was the one and only holy and important thing in life…” (Kerouac 4). This sexual appetite and sex business, and Dean’s character on the whole, represents the frustration of the Beat generation. The dissatisfaction of Beat era shows itself in Dean’s character. The reader finds an interesting association of Dean’s with time, which develops with time. At the beginning, it is not Dean but Sal who is concerned with time, but gradually they switch over their notions, and now it is Dean who is all the time concerned with time. He associated time with music and the musician’s beat. For him, musicians are God, since they time their beats. He actually tries to manage his life and all the mess through staying concerned with time. We know it when he is shown in Denver, wearing outfits with watches affixed on them. Hence, we see that Dean starts off as a mad man with a messy life, but progressively, he starts valuing time over everything. His madness shifts. He is no more listening to people, although at some points in the text, the reader doubts that he is quiet. He is always in a hurry, as we hear him say, “…it is now one-fifteen and time’s running, running” (Kerouac 44). Sal identifies this change. He recognizes the shift from saint to angel to devil, when he sees the physical side of Dean’s. He watches Dean indulged in sex and drugs. During the three years, Dean gets married thrice, and has four children. This makes him quieter, which Sal realizes when he reunites with Dean after abandoning his wife and child. The reader gets to know it when Sal says, “where once Dean would have talked his way out, he now fell silent himself, but standing in front of everybody, ragged and broken and idiotic…He was Beat” (Kerouac 176). By the end of the novel, Dean’s image is shattered in Sal’s eyes, and he is no more a saint, or an angel. The reader gets an idea that the motivation for Dean to lead a life full of sex and drugs, and on the road, came from his imprisonment. The jail motivated him to become a shrouded traveler, and to satisfy his voracious sexual appetite while on the road. When once he was a carefree person with no concern with time, he converts into a quieter person when he confronts abandonment of family life, and gets concerned with time. The moral dilemma of sex and settling down with a family messes him up. He tries to resolve this conflict, by regularizing his life with time management. But whatever change he might have experienced during the whole personal development, he gets down from a saintly figure to a devilish one in Sal’s eyes. To conclude, “On the Road” describes the personal development of two of its main characters, over time. Sal turns from a weak and depressed figure into a confident and lively person; while, Dean turns from a carefree figure into a serious and quieter one, their personal dilemmas being responsible for this change. Both Sal and Dean are a depiction of Beat generation’s frustration and dissatisfaction. This shows up in the early character of Sal’s, when he was dissatisfied with his intellectual life, and also in the character of Dean’s, when he was shown dissatisfied with his sexual appetite and drug addiction. However, Sal’s character is more believable, since he realized the worth of his own origin after seeing a contrasting region. Works Cited Jack, Kerouac. On the Road. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1979. Read More