Jaleel Thomas

5/1/2017

ENG 2850

On the Road

In chapters one through three of the novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac the reader takes a journey of Protagonist Sal Paradise and all of the friends he meets on his journey to the West Coast. We initially meet Sal as a young college “intellectual” writer in New York City. He’d recently split up from a life of marriage to then be introduced to a life of the road. He had aspirations of leaving the east coast and traveling west for years; As he stated: “I’d often dreamed of going west to see the country, always vaguely planning and never taking off” (Kerouac 3). His life was arguably boring until he met Dean. This argument shows some validity when he states “With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road” (Kerouac 3). In this excerpt, we meet an array of characters that all play a part in Sal’s Journey to the West, people like Chad King and Tim Gray who knew Dean. The Relationship between Dean and Sal is the most important of them all. Sal was infatuated with the lifestyle Dean lived and vice versa. Sal displays infatuation when he points out that Dean “was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and together with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him” (Kerouac 6). Essentially implying how Sal views dean in a light that he hasn’t embodied. Moreover, Dean shows his infatuation with Sals’ intelligence when he said: “Go ahead, everything you do is great” (Kerouac 6). Based on the readings I will say that sals’ aspirations and peer pressure from all the characters like Eddie and Dean in the story were a direct correlation with Sals’ journey to Denver. Sal changed from a college man to a hitchhiking hobo for the sake of fulfilling his desires of seeing more of the world specifically the West. With only 50 dollars to his name, he travels from car to car and truck driver to truck driver in search for “The gang in Denver which included Carlo Marx, Dean, Chad King, Tim gray, Mary Lou, and even his old college buddy Roland Major. He “…Looked forward to all of them with joy and anticipation” (Kerouac 16). All of the people who lived life more ‘on the edge’ were the people who glamorized Denver and the freedoms that come with it. Based on the reading, I’ve come to the conclusion that it was peer pressure and his aspirations to see more of the world like his colleagues. What do you think caused him to take off in a matter of months from Winter to summer to take off with only $50(ideally not those two factors)? Also, have you been in a place where you felt like you’ve been working in circles to reach your dreams like Sal and if so can you compare spontaneous moment in the story with your real life experience?