With a title like On the Road,
it is not so far-reaching of a speculation to insist that there is
something meaningful to be extracted from the travels of Sal
Paradise. Kerouac challenges the typical thoughts and themes
associated with travel as a transformative process that initially
began to be uprooted in the wake of the Lost Generation. The popular
ideals inherent in Horace Greeley's “Go west young man” and other
testaments to the effects of travel on the human spirit and condition
caused dissonance for many young peoples still reeling from war and
displacement. Both The Great Gatsby
and The Sun Also Rises,
as products of the Lost Generation, presented travel as a dead art:
the green hills that inspired the country are gone and replaced with
gaudy houses and there is no escape from it anywhere. Kerouac seems
to echo these sentiments as the colloquial father of the Beat
Generation which followed in the footsteps of the previous war-struck
generation, yet as is characteristic of the style, he pushes the
claim and seeks new truth in what was originally believed to be
annihilated.
The
opening chapter concludes as Sal gets the itch to get up and go,
“ready to take off,” and Kerouac punctuates this first step to
begin the journey with a hopeful banner to be pursued throughout the
rest of the novel, that “somewhere along the line the pearl would
be handed to me” (8). This pearl of wisdom is to be expected, but
interestingly enough, Kerouac leaves out the means by which it will
be handed to Sal. He is not obtaining it himself, so who gives it to
him? Or what? And where? Thus the first nuance of travel is posed to
the reader and it is not an unfamiliar one for our class; each time
one sets out to discover, the method of discovery may be something
wildly unexpected. It is certainly unexpected to Sal, whether the
realization strikes him during or after the journey.
Another
element of travel starts to become clear when Sal reaches the
Mississippi river. Though not necessarily the “beginning” of the
West, it is a landmark that remains consistently relevant in
expeditions throughout American history. Huckleberry Finn
being one of the most prominent bearers of the image of the river, it
bleeds through the page into chapter 3, where Kerouac writes of the
waters that it “smells like the raw body of America itself because
it washes it up” (12). It mirrors the moment when Huck and Jim
encounter the houses and books and other matters of materialism come
flowing down and corrupting the nature of the river. Sal has not
quite left the East just yet, and that which he is trying to escape
is still close by to him. Even in Des Moines, the “dividing line
between the East of my youth and the West of my future,” he feels
separate and distant, like “somebody else, some stranger” (15),
so the further he gets, he begins to realize something about his own
condition. It begins to seem that a transformation is taking place
despite the places themselves being not all that different from where
he left.
Standing
on the edge of the West coast does no better for Sal than his
experiences on the East. He looks over “the great raw bulge and
bulk of my American continent,” but his mind and heart are drawn to
the “something brown and holy about the East” (79). Having
achieved what it was he set out to do, fulfilling all standards of
seeking new frontiers to find your own life, Sal is inevitably drawn
back to the place that he came from. He alludes that he was ignorant
to feel that the West was “emptyheaded” (79), but it can be
supposed that what there was to find in West was not specific to the
West itself and rather in the passage from East to West (and back
again) which allowed Sal to venture into the deepest parts of
himself. He sees his desperation for love in Terry and the collapse
of himself in Remi's company. Traveling as prescribed to Hemingway or
Fitzegerald or Gertrude Stein may have become reveled to be a trumped
up idealistic view of experiencing oneself, but Kerouac reroutes this
description in describing traveling as a mindset rather than a series
of actions and checkpoints. Approaching the halfway point of the
book, Sal may only describe this nuance as “the bug [that] was on
me again,” but he sees it in the person of Dean Moriarity,
constantly in motion and seeking both knowledge and horizons (115).
-----------------------
I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
Round and round they sped.
I was disturbed at this;
I accosted the man.
“It is futile,” I said,
“You can never —”
“You lie,” he cried,
And ran on.
-- Stephen Crane
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