“I spun around till I was dizzy; I thought I’d fall down as in a dream, clear off the precipice. Oh where is the girl I love? I thought, and looked everywhere, as I had looked everywhere in the little world below.” “…New York was throwing up its cloud of dust and brown steam. There is something brown and holy about the East; and California is white like washlines and emptyheaded” (p. 79)
This quote interested me the most because throughout the novel Sal becomes attracted to almost every beauty that he comes into contact with. During his time in California, Sal meets up with his old college friend Remi . This chapter shows how Sal stole Remi’s girlfriend in the past and made her his wife, soon to be ex-wife. The two buddies meet up and Sal is warned not to flirt with his lover, Lee Ann. Towards the end of the chapter, Sal is urged to “jump down from the mast and land right in her”. He even tries a couple of tricks in order to land a girlfriend, but is unsuccessful and many times lands a homosexual man instead. This allows me to conclude that Sal might have gone on this adventure in order to find himself a companion for his lonely life back in New Jersey. His searches in New York and California were fruitless, so he continues on to Asia in hopes that he will be rewarded for his efforts.
On page 77, Sal explains that he is “one of the very few people in the world who knew what a genuine and grand fellow” Remi was yet he spoils the entire dinner by getting unnecessarily drunk. Why?
This paragraph stuck out to me also because this seemed to animate a new interpretation of the complex experience of a road trip. Kerouac makes no attempt to hide the fact that Sal needs to move; he craves ideas, cultures, and the people in new areas more than the tangible places. For example, he notes the east as “ brown and holy,” which California is “white like wash lines and empty-headed.”
ReplyDeleteSal himself seems to desire and fear his own wanderlust after events earlier in the chapter, such as needing to leave San Francisco or he’ll “go crazy” because he has, in some ways, assimilated into an organized existence. Sal feels that if he is stationary and takes part in the organized world his own stir-craziness leads him to do things like threaten homosexual men that hit on him, even though he has many gay friends. Also, his inability to control himself when Remi’s stepfather shows up seems to characterize his anxiety of stationary life turns destructive for himself as well as those around him. It’s this feeling that seems to be the drive him to move; he has turned his movements into a game of survival. Earlier in the book Kerouac seems to make a stronger case for the journey of change that is synonymous with a road trip, but as Sal’s eccentricities are revealed I feel his argument for what the idea of a road trip is changed through his experience along the road trip.
From this understanding of a road trip, can there truly be an enjoyable experience if you are constantly on the move against your own insecurity and anxiety, simply battling your own psyche?
I think that Sal is a really impulsive person. He seems to follow impulses in everything that he does. He goes to dinner with Remi’s stepfather with all the good intention in the world and wanting to please Remi feeling he owes him this respect. Yet at the dinner he follows impulsively with Roland Major and gets drunk, ruining the evening for Remi. A more rational person would have foreseen the consequences of such action and realized he would severely damage such a dear friendship by doing what Sal ends up doing. Sal only sees the destruction he has left behind. He is restless but it is because he is impulsively chasing something that is seeming to be something smaller all the time. All through the book he has been impulsive. The power of hindsight seems to be the only thing that he has. He doesn't realize the hardships he would put himself through by spending most of his money to buy a bus ticket to Chicago. He does it because he got really frustrated from his first attempt to get there. His memories and his interpretation of them seem to smarter than the person who was going through them. He doesn’t like how his friend Remi steals through out this chapter but joins in with him because it is something to do. He even says that he is starting to “get the bug.” (p.71) And now being where he set out to go in the beginning, he finds the East a much better place to be, foreshadowing what he has come to be: a restless, impulsively moving vessel on the road. He is going to go to Texas now and “the rest be damned.” (p.78)
ReplyDeleteThis paragraph stood out because one of Sal's motivation points is to find the "girl" that he loves. Kerouac makes it clear that finding an object of affection is not the most important part of Sal's search. I think there are sections in this book, such as the quote used here, that show that Sal is trying to decide whether or not his dream girl should take a paramount importance his quest.
ReplyDeleteFrom my perspective, Sal is strongly affected by the actions of the people he encounters on his road trip. He laments that he and Remi will not be able to do "the big pile of wash" together, but he feels like it would be wrong to stay and I understand his conflict.
When Sal describes how glorious the Sunday seemed, after a long night out of drinking with Major, I relate to his feeling of wanting to be productive. Sometimes after a long night of drinking, I have to wake up early and accomplish a task in order to ease my conscience. It appears that Sal was experiencing a similar feeling.
I want to leave the class with the question, do you think the best way for Sal to find the girl of his dreams is to keep trying to seduce every woman he is interested in for a one night stand?