Lost on the Road
...ying child support for Camille, he cannot resist the call of the road, “leaving confusion and nonsense behind and performing our one and noble function of the time, move” (134). This becomes Dean’s central character within the novel: He is the perpetual vagabond. Dean is not just one of the many disillusioned teens, he is the poster boy or “leader” of these sentiments of the time. Kerouac gave Dean this role for a reason: To prove that life, in fact, is hopeless, and even the most resourceful and colorful characters won’t make it in life. Dean (and the reader) never knows where he is going, and it is this role that will prevent him from ever being “found.” The anti-Hero sentiments after WWI and WWII also promote the idea that there is no saving Dean. Kerouac knew the effects of war and how it affected the young men who lived through it, those whose lives were in shambles, thinking it was maybe better to die then to live. There were no heroes after these wars, none in life and none in fiction either. Dean is painted throughout the book and as the main attractor and center of attention. In any other situation, we would consider Dean the hero of the novel, especially if he had made it in the end. But Kerouac creates Dean as the anti-Hero, and as a result he will not have a glorious, triumphant ending. Kerouac makes a reference to Proust, the French novelist who wrote about memory and the past, in order to drive the point home that Dean is the character people will remember, not only for his colorful behavior, but for his iconoclastic portrayal and demise. Throughout the novel, the characters leave their establishments and continually head out on the road in search of something. We find out that Sal was in search of love. His constant attempts to hook up with Mexican waitresses and other floosies he meets along the way leave him empty handed. But near the conclusion, we see him find what he was looking for. “So I went up and there she was, the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly” (304). Here Sal has at last “found” at least part of what he is looking for in life. He has found some sort of direction in life. But while we learn all this about Sal, we never know throughout the course of the novel what Dean is looking for. He immerses himself in random literary discussions, drugs, alcohol, and relationships he never keeps. He is going from one thing to another with no apparent course or direction or end. These two characters represent the two sides of Kerouac as well. Sal represents the side that can and does “overcome the night” that envelopes society (307). But Dean represents the side that can’t finish what he starts, and “succumbs to the night...