On the Road

“It was the spirit of the West sitting right next to me.”

Sal’s conception of the West is synonymous with his conception of Dean. To Sal, Dean and the West both represent a form of uninhibited freedom that is juxtaposed against the mundane, dull, and predictable world of the East. Sal is a traveler through the American West, while Dean is the embodiment, meaning that Sal is simply a biographer who documents Dean’s freewheeling energy and the regions they explore. Sal may be physically present in the West, but he never lives it the way Dean does.

“Dean, who had the tremendous energy of a new kind of American saint, and Carlo were the Underground monsters of that season in Denver.”

Sal views Dean with an almost religious fervor. He compares Dean to a saint, a spiritual embodiment of everything that the American zeitgeist has to offer. Dean Moriarty’s energy excites Sal like nothing else, converting him into a believer in the importance of freedom. Nevertheless, he also compares Dean and Carlo to underground monsters. They may operate in an almost religious manner, but Sal is under no impression that their saintly approaches to life are in any way morally good. Morality is a relic of the past, something Dean’s new American religion can leave behind.

“You can’t stop the machine!”

The machine Sal describes isn’t just the way Carlo and Dean talk long into the night. The machine is a metaphor for their entire approach to life. Nothing can slow them down or stop them. The machine rumbles on through the night like a factory, producing nonsense, freedom, and beauty in equal measure. Sal learns that the machine is unstoppable because the immense energy of his friends has a mechanical, inevitable, and overpowering quality that is hardly human.

“The world owes me a few things, that’s all.”

Remi may consider himself apart from most of Sal’s friends, but he harbors the same grievances against a world that marginalizes him. Remi, like many men his age, feels disconnected to the old world. He wants to have fun and to embrace life’s vivacity, while society offers him a small wage and a small house. To redress what he perceives as an imbalance, Remi steals. The world owes him compensation for forcing him to live in a certain way. Like many other characters, Remi harbors a grievance against mainstream society that he acts on by breaking its rules and expectations.

“Here I was at the end of America—no more land—and now there was nowhere to go but back.”

Sal travels from one side of the US to the other but still feels unsatisfied. He thought he would find some form of satisfaction in a different geographical location, but what he wants is the thrill of the unknown. He savors the journey because he constantly feels an urge to be wherever he’s not. He bounces around America, slowly realizing that he doesn’t want to go to any single place but instead wants to embrace the freedom and uncertainty of the road itself. He travels west and then back east because the journey itself has more meaning than any of the destinations.

“That grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American night.” 

Throughout On the Road, music provides an emotional and historical context. The wild, chaotic energy of jazz and bop musicians reflects Dean’s view of life, while the cowboy and boogie-woogie music are comparatively mainstream, dull, and flat. America is a rich and varied culture, but the excitement of jazz music echoes the lives of the young people seeking to untether themselves from traditions and expectations; it symbolizes the freedom and the madness that people like Dean seek.

“The madness of Dean had bloomed into a weird flower.”

Dean passes through several different iterations in the novel. Sal notices that Dean is maturing, in a way, and compares him to a blooming flower. However, this maturation doesn’t necessarily mean that Dean is settling for a normal life. He has matured into weirdness, a choice of words that reflects Dean’s alienation from society. He has grown up into something different, something that may not follow society’s rules but—like a blooming flower—has a unique beauty all its own.

“When Lucille saw me with Dean and Marylou her face darkened - she sensed the madness they put in me.”

Other characters notice a difference in Sal when he’s around Dean. Although Sal is the novel’s narrator, he excludes most of the story when he’s not with Dean. These dull periods are not, in Sal’s opinion, worthy of the narrative. However, people like Lucille see that Sal is a completely different person when he’s not with Dean. She sees the madness that Dean provokes in Sal. The dull stretches of Sal’s life are notable by their absence. While people like Lucille appreciate Sal in these moments, he doesn’t like himself. Lucille and others may dislike Dean’s effect on Sal, but Sal doesn’t feel his life is interesting unless he’s with Dean.

“Great displays of war might were lined along Pennsylvania Avenue as we rolled by in our battered boat.”

The car full of people passes by a presidential inauguration, and the characters glimpse the tanks and planes of war. Sal and Dean are part of a generation that grew up in the shadow of war and now wants nothing to do with it. The war machines that line the streets of Washington are relics and antiques, vehicles that starkly contrast with the string of half-functioning cars that Sal and Dean pilot across America. The war planes and tanks are antiques, while the car and the people inside it represent the future. Their beat-up car might seem inconsequential next to such terrifying machines, but Dean and Sal know that their car has a potential for liberation and freedom that the war vehicles do not—and that the older generation could never understand.

“This was a manuscript of the night we couldn’t read.”

As a writer, Sal understands the power of an unfinished book. He spends much of the novel sitting at a typewriter and working on his manuscript, but he’s writing another, more meaningful book whenever he spends time with Dean. This metaphorical text exists in the unknown space between written and unwritten. The men rarely have anything but the broadest of plans, and they can never read the story that they’re writing. Each day and night have the potential of a blank page to fill with sentences and stories, but neither man knows where the narrative will go. Sal’s writerly instincts tell him that Dean encapsulates a vivacity and narrative energy unlike anything else—one that is almost impossible to contain in simple words.

“He looked like someday he’d be the pagan mayor of San Francisco. But his energies ran out.”

The more time Sal spends with Dean, the more he comes to know Dean’s limitations. The unbridled, chaotic man he met at the story’s beginning cannot continue forever in the same way. Just as Sal’s travels take him to the boundaries of America and allow him to fill in the blank spaces on the map of his home country, the time he spends with Dean allows him to come to terms with Dean’s nuances and complexities. One day, Sal now knows, Dean’s energy will run out. While they began the narrative on an upward trajectory that seems unending, the strains and stresses of life lead Sal to realize that Dean’s life will only end tragically. 

“I ran immediately to Dean.”

Whatever the situation, Sal’s first instinct is always to find Dean. They’re bound together in such a way that Sal immediately wants to protect Dean, to laugh with him, and to safeguard their future. The bond between the two is so strong that they seek out each other over everything else, at the cost of other relationships.

“Now the angel had arrived and he was going mad again.”

Sal must confront his role in destroying Dean’s personal relationships. Before Sal arrived, Camille and Dean were living together. Although they may not have been perfectly happy, the time they spent together at least approached normality. Once Sal arrives, Camille knows that Dean’s returning to his old way of life is inevitable. Though Dean wants to leave with Sal, he will be abandoning his wife and child. Sal glosses over his role in Camille’s sadness and never thinks too long that he’s taking a father away from his child, thereby ensuring that Dean does to his own children what his father did to him.

“He was BEAT—the root, the soul of Beatific.”

Sal creates an ironic contrast between the term beat and his description of Dean as beatific. The term beat typically describes the down-and-out conditions in which Sal, Dean, and the other young people live. They are people with no money and whom society has beaten down, but nevertheless they try to live. Beatific is a term that commonly describes a sense of blissful happiness. Dean, as beat’s embodiment, blends the two disparate ideas together. He may be down and out—beaten up by life—but he encapsulates a beautiful form of existence, which shows that happiness can exist anywhere. 

“He’s filling empty space with the substance of our lives.”

Dean’s reaction to a jazz musician could just as easily be a description of his own existence. He marvels at the way the musician fills emptiness with something substantive, which is the exact effect he has on Sal. Dean bursts into Sal’s dull life and fills it with meaning. The time they spend together in the empty parts of the country adds substance to Sal’s existence. Dean may not realize it, but his existence is a form of music that Sal comes to appreciate more than anything else.

“I could see he used to be Dean’s older brother.”

Sal meets other people who have filled the emotional niche in Dean’s life. Dean accumulates relationships as he bounces around the country: He has brother, father, and mother figures scattered across America. Sal begins to realize that Dean has burned out those relationships and insulted or transgressed against the people who once loved him. The use of past tense is telling, in that these relationships were once strong but now are comparatively weak. Sal currently occupies that role in Dean’s life, but it is a matter of time before their relationship also deteriorates.

“Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there.”

As he plans their journey, Dean reveals his entire ethos. This quotation shows that the destination and the point of origin are irrelevant to Dean and Sal. In fact, the journey itself is all that matters. Dean’s life is a constant journey from one place to the next, and the idea of a stationary, stable life horrifies him. He must keep moving until he completely burns out and is unable to continue.

“The same battered trunk stuck out from under the bed, ready to fly.”

Dean’s trunk pokes out from beneath his bed as a lingering threat to his marriage’s stability. Its position reminds everyone of Dean’s capacity to simply pack up and leave at a moment’s notice. Dean is never far from the road, so his traveling trunk—battered from years of abuse—becomes a symbol of his ability to abandon everything in a heartbeat and return to his old ways. 

“It was like the imminent arrival of Gargantuan preparations had to be made to widen the gutters of Denver and foreshorten certain laws to fit his suffering bulk and bursting ecstasies.”

Dean’s imminent arrival in Denver is like a force of nature. The final, dramatic trip rips Dean out of his stable homelife in New York and thrusts him out into the world. Dean’s chaotic energy is even more unbound and untamable than usual given that he spent so long pent up in a small apartment and a loving relationship. Denver isn’t ready for the energy of Dean Moriarty, so Sal writes about how they will have to plan as though they’re expecting a hurricane or some other form of natural disaster.

“He drank in this saloon like the ghost of his father.”

Dean’s father isn’t dead, but he still casts a long shadow over his son’s life. Haunted by his father’s abandonment of him, Dean fruitlessly searches for him at random railroad stops and truck stations. Dean isn’t necessarily chasing his actual father but the memory of the man who had such a profound effect on him as a child. Dean drinks heavily in the saloon to forget his dead relationship with his father. Although the man is alive, his relationship with his son has never really been alive. 

“When I saw that, I was too ashamed to try for the one I really wanted.”

Sal, Dean, and Stan visit a brothel in Mexico where the prostitutes are incredibly young. Sal stares at a teenage girl with lust until he sees her mother enter the room. This moment reveals the limits of Sal’s debauchery. Even though he’s far from sober, he recognizes the element of tragedy in his surroundings. His tendencies as a writer and his guilt mean that he cannot act upon his lust. The scene reminds Sal that the locals are humans rather than characters. The Mexican people have their own lives and tragedies rather than being side characters in a narrative about Dean and Sal’s adventures. Although Sal is a writer, the scene illustrates that he’s aware of the differences between real life and stories.

“I realized the jungle takes you over and you become it.”

As the men drive through the jungle, they feel overwhelmed. The jungle is a metaphor for their lifestyle. Just as they pass through the tall trees and dense undergrowth and lose all notion of their destination or origin, their lives have the same effect. The time they spend on the road is a metaphorical jungle, closing them off to the outside world and trapping them in a dangerous, unknown place with only each other and a car to get them through. Just as they feel like they’re becoming part of the jungle, their lifestyles have overtaken them, and they’ve pushed hard against the limits of what they can do in a society without destroying themselves.

“When I got better I realized what a rat he was, but then I had to understand the impossible complexity of his life, how he had to leave me there, sick, to get on with his wives and woes.”

Dean abandons Sal in Mexico even though Sal is sick with dysentery. In this moment, Sal finally understands how Camille, Marylou, and Inez feel when Dean abandons them. Whereas Sal was once the person who inspired Dean to hit the road and leave behind everything he cared about, now Sal is the abandoned one. Dean must return to his complicated obligations, and the strange period they’ve spent together ends. They can never recapture the magic of their time together, especially now that Sal realizes that he’s just another burned-out relationship in Dean’s litany of broken friendships. Sal understands, at last, that he’s not unique.