Annotation: Imagery

 

Reading Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is exhausting. The seemingly never-ending physical and emotional settings of road trip adventures and life-bending experiences feature the alter ego personas of Sal Paradise (Jack Kerouac), the narrator, and his buddy Dean Moriarity (Neal Cassady). The book relates the mindset of the author’s “Beat” generation protagonists in the post-World War II 1950s; the era of folks like Allen Ginsberg (Carlo Marx in the book) – think acid trips and poetry, and William S. Burroughs – think heroin-addled, creative person, prolifically writing paranoid fiction that profoundly influenced the 1960s counterculture.

As the narrative begins, Sal suffers a divorce and determines he will find the girl and enlightenment he seeks by going to San Francisco. He has fifty dollars to his name. Just barely into Iowa, after multiple buses and hitchhike rides, he comes to a realization.

I was standing in the purple darkness. Now I was scared. Luckily a man going back to Davenport gave me a lift downtown. I went to sit in the bus station and think this over. I ate another apple pie and ice cream. But I was right where I started from. (p. 12)

I can see this setting. I absorb the narrator’s recurring despondency that follows an earlier sense of excitement, encouragement that he is making progress towards Denver and San Francisco, and his hopes for fulfillment. In Denver, he meets up with friends, including his old New York buddy, Dean Moriarity. Sal observes Dean’s joie d’vivre, general excitement for life without any apparent direction, and preoccupation with sex.

Curiously, Dean was the man Sal often chose to be his guiding light, to lead him to a higher understanding of social and spiritual realization. While Kerouac has a tremendous gift for describing settings that elevate my mood (feeling excited for the narrator), I am learning that he will pierce my bubble (plunge me back into the soup), sometimes within the same sentence.

I suddenly realized I was in California. Warm, palmy air – air you can kiss – and palms… Suddenly, the vast expanse of a bay (just before dawn) with the sleepy lights of  Frisco festooned across. Over the Oakland Bay Bridge, I slept soundly for the first time since Denver, so that I was rudely jolted in the bus station at Market and Fourth into the memory of the fact that I was three thousand miles from my aunt’s house in Patterson, New Jersey I wandered out like a haggard ghost, and there she was, Frisco —long, bleak streets with trolley wires all shrouded in fog and whiteness. I stumbled around a few blocks. Weird bums asked me for dimes in the dawn. (p. 54)

Without saying it exactly, Kerouac reminds a reader that Sal, metaphorically, again, “was right where I started from.” I also see the brilliance Kerouac shows with his detailed descriptions of the environment that place me into the action.

The physical setting of a typical, heavy drinking bout finds the two hitting favorite jazz saloons in San Francisco. Sal thinks to himself, “It was the end of the continent; they didn’t give a damn.” (p. 167) The performance of a local singer mimics the pair’s state of mind.

Lampshade is a big colored guy who comes into musical Frisco saloons with a coat, hat, and scarf and jumps on the bandstand and starts singing; the veins pop in his forehead; he heaves back and forth and blows a big foghorn blues out of every muscle in his soul. He yells at people while he’s singing: “Don’t die to go to heaven, start in on Doctor Pepper and end up on whiskey!” His voice booms over everything. He grimaces, he writhes, he does everything. (p. 166)

Although they seem simpatico, Sal and Dean are on the outs at the time. Sal narrates, “Dean and I goofed around San Francisco in this manner until I got my next GI check and got ready to go home.”

What I accomplished by coming to Frisco, I don’t know. Dean didn’t care one way or the other. I bought a loaf of bread and meats and made myself ten sandwiches to cross the country with again. It was the end; I wanted to get out. At dawn, I got my bus to New York and said goodbye to Dean and Marylou. They wanted some of my sandwiches. I told them no. It was a sullen moment. We were all thinking we’d never see one another again, and we didn’t care. (p. 167)

Exasperation. That’s what I feel when the two hook-up in Denver, like a crazy lover who takes back the bad-boy, time after time. A thoroughly drunk Dean steals a few cars, always on the lookout for another vehicle to heist. The fifth car he steals during one night of marauding ends up in a farmer’s field with Sal in the passenger seat. (It turns out this hot rod belongs to a detective.)

(We) went bouncing and flying straight over the hard alfalfa rows at the end of the road whomp-ti-whomp till finally the car couldn’t take anymore and stopped dead under a cottonwood near the old mill. “Can’t go any farther,” said Dean simply and got out and started walking back over the cornfield, about half a mile, in his jockey shortsin the moonlight. (p.210-211)

After more comings and goings between the two, Dean drove a heap of a ’37 Ford to Denver, where he joined up with Sal without warning. Dean is headed to Mexico City to get a divorce from his current wife in New York City. With little hesitation, Sal and his friend Stan Shepard veer south for a road adventure with Dean. They got mega-stoned on cannabis and whored in Gregoria and drove without headlights through jungle-like surroundings. Bartering an old wristwatch for a berry-sized crystal from some Indian girls, Kerouac writes, “He stood among them with his ragged face to the sky, looking for the next, highest, and final pass, and seemed like a prophet that had come to them. He got back into the car.”

Sal contracts dysentery in Mexico City. With divorce papers in hand, Dean decides he wants to return to New York City and the woman whose relationship he had just severed. Dean bids farewell to Sal, saying, “Gotta get back to my life.”

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. “Okay, old Dean, I say nothing.” (p.288)

Returning to New York, he wrote to Dean, now in San Francisco. Dean bolts for Sal’s apartment. Hoping for empathy, he explained, “I came on a railroad pass – cabooses – old hard-bench coaches – Texas – played flute and wooden sweet potato all the way. Long, long, awful trip, five days and five nights just to SEE you, Sal.” Three days later, he made rail arrangements to return to Frisco. Dean packed his ragged luggage and walked out with Sal and his girlfriend, who were going to a Duke Ellington concert in a Cadillac with Sal and Dean’s mutual friend. It was a frigid night. The friend refused to take Dean to the station, “Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat, walked off alone, eyes on the street ahead.”

So, in America, when the sun goes down, and I sit on the old broken-down river pier, I think of Dean Moriarity, I think of Dean Moriarity. (p. 293)

There is beauty to Sal and Dean’s nostalgic relationship, a depth cultivated by the emotional and physical settings that Kerouac crafts. Yet, I am tired of being whipsawed between hope and their awful reality. Growing weary of such profound dysfunction, disbelief, and despair, I was glad to see the last word.

 

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