On the Road begins with the two main characters of the novel, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty, meeting each other in New York after Dean has been released from reform school and he and his new wife, Marylou, have moved to New York. Dean is an eccentric and ecstatic character, a wannabe intellectual, who wants to learn to write from Sal and his group of friends in New York. After Dean and Marylou have a fight in which she reports to the police "some false trumped-up hysterical crazy charge," Dean moves in with Sal to Sal's aunt's house. The stay is short, however-Dean soon meets Sal's friend Carlo Marx and begins to spend all his time with him. Dean and Carlo become fast friends, and Dean becomes hysterically excited with life in New York, sharing intellectual ideas, writing, and chasing women. He does all this while working as an attendant at a parking lot, a job he undertakes with recklessness. Sal believes Carlo and Dean are mad but follows them because they are interesting. To Sal, Dean and Carlo are people who "burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles." Their intensity and, often, insanity drive Sal's curiosity and yield the definition of what it means to be Beat.

As spring approaches Dean leaves New York to travel back West. Realizing that his time hanging around his college campus needs to end and that he needs new experiences and ideas as a writer, Sal decides that later in the spring he will join his new friend Dean in his travels. In July of 1947, with fifty dollars in his pocket, Sal leaves New York for San Francisco. He decides to take Route 6 and hitchhikes to the road's beginning in upstate New York. After getting drenched in a rain storm, he hitches another ride back to New York, realizing that Route 6 doesn't have enough traffic to take him where he wants to go. He swears to be in Chicago by the next day, however, so he spends most of his money on a bus ticket to make sure.

After taking a bus to Chicago, Sal spends a day exploring the city before hitchhiking to Davenport, Iowa. Catching rides with a pair of truckers and a group of college boys from the University of Iowa, Sal ends up in Des Moines the morning, where he gets a cheap hotel room in which sleeps through the day. As he wakes at dusk, he has the distinct feeling that he does not know who he is anymore: "I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel ... I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else."

Looking forward to meeting his friends in Denver, Sal quickly leaves the hotel and hitches a ride with a new friend he meets, an enthusiastic New Yorker named Eddie who tells dirty jokes and reminds Sal of his cousin from the Bronx. Eddie and Sal hitch rides through Iowa and Nebraska and meet up with a cowboy who wants them to drive an extra car through Nebraska where he plans to meet his wife. Eddie drives, a little too fast, and after several hundred miles on the road and a stop at a roadside diner, Eddie and Sal hitch more rides into Shelton, Nebraska, where they get stuck.

After being solicited for work by a carnival owner, a Nebraska farm trailer going to Denver comes by and offers a ride to only one of the men. Without even discussing it, Eddie jumps on the wagon and takes off with a shirt Sal had let him borrow. Sal waits in Shelton until a young guy gives him a ride a hundred miles closer to Denver.

As chapter four opens, Sal gets the "greatest ride" of his life on a "flatboard" truck headed to Los Angeles full of hitchhikers: farm boys on their way to the harvests, high school kids hitchhiking for the summer, Montana Slim, Mississippi Gene and his charge, and boxcar hobos. Only a quick stop to eat and buy whiskey interrupts the drive into Colorado. As they drink and laugh, playing practical jokes on each other while trying to urinate over the side of the truck, Sal and Mississippi Gene realize they have a common friend in a hobo named Big Slim, who "punches cows" in East Texas. Sal befriends Mississippi Gene and his charge and gives all his cigarettes to them. As Sal begins to get more and more excited about getting to Denver, they all continue to drink. They bundle up under a tarpaulin to keep from freezing in the cold Colorado night. When the truck reaches Cheyenne, Wyoming, Sal and Montana Slim jump off the truck to explore the celebrations of Wild West Week in the town.

Analysis

The first two chapters introduce the reader to the main characters of the novel, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty. Sal, as a writer, is fascinated with interesting people and new experiences. Dean, spontaneous in his appetites for food, sex, drugs, and life, becomes a fascination for Sal and spurs his desire to travel.

The opening chapters also present an overview of the lifestyle of the "Beat Generation." It is an ecstatic and stimulating lifestyle based on experiencing and living life, often involving sex and drugs. But it is also an intellectually stimulating lifestyle in which ideas and writing share primary importance. Dean and Carlo Marx share an especially deep intellectual kinship. As Sal prepares to begin his journey on the road, we see Sal as a character who is beginning to separate from his life as a student, a member of a working-class family, and a reclusive writer. Sal's aunt believes Dean is a bad influence but encourages the trip anyway. Sal becomes hungry for the lifestyle and adventures that he is sure his friends are having in the broad landscape of America.

Sal's initial mishap on his journey, choosing the wrong route, getting stuck in the rain, having to return to New York, and eventually spending most of his money on a bus ticket to Chicago, highlights his early naivete and eagerness to join the beatnik lifestyle. The reader will soon experience with Sal, though, a full immersion in the beatnik culture of America.

Chapters three and four introduce the reader to the sights and characters of the road as well as Sal's evolving character as he begins his journey. In several instances the reader is made aware of Sal's progression from an East Coast college kid into an example of the Beat lifestyle. Through chapters three and four Sal mentions that he only ate pie and ice cream during this first trip, an allusion to childhood choices. Eddie, the friend he meets outside of Adel, Iowa, reminds him of his family back East and gives him some comfort on the trip. In a cheap hotel in Des Moines, after crossing the Mississippi River (the gateway to the West), the first changes begin to take root in Sal's character. He wakes up in the hotel to find that he no longer knows who he is; he feels like a different person. While this transformation will continue to develop throughout this first cross-country journey, this moment marks a turning point for Sal from his New York life to his beatnik life.

As the trip progresses west, the characters begin to take on personalities that mirror the landscape. The Iowa truck drivers are loud and boisterous, and so is the cowboy in a diner in Nebraska. "I said to myself, Wham, listen to that man laugh. That's the West, here I am in the West," Sal says as he listens to the cowboy entertain the others in the diner. The reader also is introduced to the slowly fading culture of the Old West. As Sal pulls into Cheyenne, Wyoming, he is greeted by the Wild West Festival, a celebration that he sees as sadly trying to recreate a time that is already gone.

Sal's fellow hitchhikers on the truck headed to Los Angeles also begin to represent the underbelly of a country Sal had not known in New York. Mississippi Gene and his charge are running from the law, and poor hobos cannot afford to buy food-they all contrast starkly to the diner full of pretty girls whom Sal sees at a stop in Colorado. As Sal continues on his journey to Denver, readers begin to see a segment of the American heartland who live on the fringes of society.

Sal and Montana Slim begin bar hopping and partying with the other revelers at the Cheyenne Wild West Festival. Sal gets drunk and chases various women, spending all but two dollars of the seven he has left. After almost taking a bus to a middle-of-nowhere town in Colorado with a girl he picks up, Sal eventually starts to feel bad about the situation he has put himself in: almost broke, drunk, and tired. He finds a spot on a bench in the bus station and sleeps till the morning. When he wakes, Montana Slim is gone. Sal is ready to leave Cheyenne and the Wild West Festival.

He picks up a few rides outside Cheyenne and again begins to feel the excitement of getting to Denver. After a brief nap at a filling station, he finally catches his ride into Denver and arrives in the city at Larimer Street.

In Denver, Sal finds his friend Chad King, and Chad picks him up from the bus station. He finds out that Chad in no longer friends with Dean or Carlo Marx, both of whom are in Denver, and begins to feel pulled between the two groups (Dean's friends and Chad's friends). He goes back to Chad's house to take a nap and eat some food, but he is worried about finding Dean and Carlo.

In chapter six the reader begins to learn some of the history of Dean Moriarty. Dean was from Denver originally and had been raised on Larimer Street. His father had been an alcoholic, and at the age of six Dean had pleaded before a judge to set his father free from jail. He had begged for money on the streets of Denver and eventually started hanging around pool halls. After he "set a Denver record for stealing cars" he was sent to reform school.

Sal moves into an apartment owned by the parents of another Denver friend, Tim Gray, and begins to take part in the life of the city, visiting its bars, drinking, and meeting old and new friends. Eventually, Carlo finds out that Sal is in the city and tracks him down. Carlo and Dean are making big plans for their lives. Dean is getting a divorce from Marylou but still sleeping with her in the interim, all the while carrying on an affair with another woman. Both are doing a lot of drugs, Benzedrine, and staying up all night to talk.

When Sal arrives at Dean's apartment, Dean answers the door naked and excitedly decides he must take Sal out on the town to find a woman. They go to Denver's Mexican-town, where they find the house of some waitress sisters and begin a wild party. Eventually, they decide to take the party to Sal's apartment, but Sal's roommate, Roland Major, refuses to let them in. They decide to head back to the downtown night spots instead, where Sal eventually finds himself alone and finally broke, having spent his last dollar.

The Denver group begins planning a trip to the mountains. Eddie, Sal's friend from the road, calls looking for work. Dean takes Sal and Eddie to the markets, and they get offered a job working from four in the morning till six in the evening. The next morning, Eddie shows up for the job but Sal does not. Instead, Sal spends his days and nights visiting various parties all over Denver, listening to Carlo Marx's poetry in late-night reading sessions, and observing Dean. Carlo and Dean, the "amazing maniacs," spend hours and hours talking, staying up all night discussing random and varied topics and making plans to go to San Francisco.

Sal then takes off for a trip to the mountains with Babe, Ray Rawlins, and Tim Gray. At an old mining town turned tourist attraction, they fix up an old shack for parties, go to the opera, and drink. The group throws a big party at their shack. It eventually gets crashed by fraternity boys, so instead they hit the town bars, where Ray Rawlins gets in a fight. Outside, standing on a mountain's edge, they yells and howl into the night, in awe of the vastness of the landscape. As the group leaves the mining town, Sal begins to feel the urge to go with Carlo and Dean to San Francisco.

Back in Denver, Sal finds out that Dean and Carlo had been in the mountains the whole time he had been there. Dean gets Sal together with Rita Bettencourt, the girl that Dean had originally wanted to get Sal together with when they first met up in Denver. Rita and Sal have awkward sex and talk about what they want from their lives. Sal takes one last lamentable walk through the streets of Denver, picks up the money his aunt wired to him, finds the shirt that his friend Eddie had left with earlier in the journey, and buys a bus ticket to San Francisco. In a last-minute phone call, Dean says that he and Carlo might join him there. Sal realizes that the whole time he had been in Denver, he had not talked with Dean for more than five minutes.

Analysis

Chapters five, six, and seven introduce the reader more fully to the beatnik lifestyle that Sal and his friends try to live. Beginning with the Wild West Festival and continuing into Denver, the reader gets a sense of the kind of free-wheeling lifestyle that continues through the rest of the book: heavy drinking, drugs, multiple sexual partners, and other excesses are all available and are encouraged within the group. There is little thought of tomorrow. Dean offers to find Sal a job and comments that everybody is broke, but there is little worry about money. These first days in Denver set the tone for the kind of hedonist lifestyle Dean, Sal, Carlo, and the rest of the group seek out in the hope of truly living life to its fullest. They are days that are "filled with eminent peril," as Sal says, quoting W.C. Fields. Yet the peril is invited and enjoyed, not something to be afraid of.

Chapter seven also attempts briefly to show the reader the cultural lines that classify these beatniks. Sal's roommate, Roland Major, writes Hemingwayan stories about young Denver residents who become annoyed and despondent over the "arty types" of Denver. According to Sal, the point of the story is that "The arty types were all over America, sucking up its blood." The Beats, while concerned with intellectualism and writing, were not these "arty types." Instead, they sought to find and be a more real America, an America hiding behind the facade of popular culture and pretentious critics.

Chapters eight, nine, and ten deepen the frenetic and, often, insane lifestyle of Sal and his Denver friends. Sal continues to deal with his deepening involvement with this group on the fringes of society. He begins to even vaguely define what being a part of the Beats truly means. During his trip to the mountains he realizes that even among his Denver friends he is slowly becoming more like Dean and Carlo, being drawn into their dark and frenetic world. Sal describes Dean and Carlo as people of "gloom, rising from the underground, the sordid hipsters of America."

These chapters also continue to draw dividing lines between that "sordid" world of Sal, Dean, and Carlo and that of mainstream America. Central City, the mining town they visit in the mountains, becomes another emblem of how America is slowly turning into a tourist destination. Though Sal has the freedom to go wherever he wants, he finds fewer and fewer places worthy of exploration. While Sal and his Denver friends try to bring their life and insanity to this mountain town, ultimately, they find they do not have a place there, so they leave sad and hung over.

Sal also feels distress over the sad state of affairs between people-they are no longer able to communicate with each other because of the societal pressures being forced upon young people. In one passage, after having a poor sexual experience with Rita Bettencourt, Sal sadly notes that "Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without ... real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and ... precious." It is in these brief moments of reflection between the constant coming and going of Sal and the rest of the beatniks that the reader gets a sense of the cultural influence and post-war sensibility beginning to take shape in America in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These brief reflections give rise to the outright rebellion that the Beat generation embodied during this time.

Sal arrives in San Francisco, two weeks late, and meets up with his old friend from college, Remi Boncoeur. Remi and his girl, Lee Ann, live by the docks in a housing project called Mill City, supposedly the only place in America where blacks and whites voluntarily live in the same neighborhood. After spending several weeks with Remi in his shack, Sal decides he needs a job, so Remi gets him one as a guard in the shipyard barracks.

The other guards are former cops who sit around and tell stories of arrests they made and riots they put down in Alcatraz. One night, before a group of sailors are to ship off in the morning, Sal attempts to keep order in the noisy barracks. Instead of keeping order, however, he ends up getting drunk with sailors and raising the American flag upside down the next morning-an offense he is told he could go to jail for.

Most of his nights at the barracks are spent with Remi. They walk the halls, and Remi devises plans to steal money from the sailors who stay there. One night they accidentally sneak into the room of the barracks supervisor, a man they name Dostioffski (a name Remi creates from his mispronunciation of Dostoevsky), and almost get caught. They also sneak into the barracks cafeteria and eat ice cream and steal food. One night Remi steals an entire load of groceries for his house, claiming that President Truman mandated that "we must cut down on the cost of living."

Between day trips into the city to see the Banana King, an old man who sells bananas on the street, and jaunts to an old freighter ship in the bay, Sal spends nights in the city trying to find a girl. He dreams of robbing a jewelry store. He tries to scare the homosexual men who make advances on him in the bathrooms of bars.

Sal is becoming tired and lonely in San Francisco, and his relationship with Remi and Lee Ann starts to deteriorate. After a night of gambling away all of their money at a race track, Remi and Lee Ann have a huge fight and Remi decides to break off his relationship with Lee Ann and his friendship with Sal. He only asks that Lee Ann and Sal pretend that everything is normal when his stepfather comes to town in a week. Both agree. Instead of behaving, though, Sal runs into one of his old friends from Denver, Roland Major, and they both get drunk and ruin the night for Remi, ruining what is left of their friendship. Sal, feeling as if he has reached the end of the road in his trip, decides to head back East.

Sal hitches rides down to Bakersfield and eventually has to take a bus into Los Angeles, where he meets a young Chicano girl named Terry who is running from her abusive husband. They hit it off and both think they are in love. In Los Angeles, they get a hotel room and begin to get drunk. Sal mentions offhand that a friend of his in New York could show her where to get work. Terry, getting drunk, misinterprets this and accuses Sal of being a pimp and trying to turn her into a prostitute. They have a fight, and Sal kicks her out of the room. Instead, Terry realizes she might be mistaken and they end up making love and falling asleep together.

In LA, Sal and Terry decide they need to get jobs to earn money before leaving for New York. Sal sees LA as a "jungle" filled with varying characters: hipsters, beats, criminals, and cops. They attempt to get jobs all over LA and Hollywood, but no one will hire them. They eventually decide to hitchhike back to New York with the thirteen dollars they have left. After Terry borrows some clothes from a friend and Sal buys some bad marijuana in a bar, they attempt to catch a ride out of LA, but only cars full of high school kids go by, making fun of Sal and Terry as they pass.

The next day they set off to try to find work picking grapes but still have no luck. Instead, they hitchhike to Terry's brother's house. Terry's brother and his friend Ricky take Sal and Terry all around the California countryside, drinking and trying to sell manure to farmers. They eventually end up in Mexico-town and get a hotel room. Sal and Terry are down to their last two dollars. For the next few days Sal, Terry, Terry's brother, Terry's son, and Ricky spend all their time getting drunk in a tent Sal rented. When their money eventually runs out, Sal gets a job picking cotton.

Sal enjoys picking cotton, even though his fingers bleed and his back aches. He is not very good at the job, though Terry and Terry's son help him. Each day Sal earns a dollar and a half, which he uses to buy food for the family that he sees as becoming his own. Sal begins to settle down into domesticity in the migrant worker tents with Terry and Terry's son. The months go by, the weather begins to turn cold, and the money begins to run out. Terry takes her son and Sal to her family, and they take Terry back in. Sal wires fifty more dollars from his aunt and prepares to go back to New York. After spending a night in a farmer's barn, Sal hitches his way to LA and buys a bus ticket to Pittsburgh.

When Sal reaches Pittsburgh, he hitches rides to Harrisburg. He meets the Ghost of the Susquehanna, an old hobo trying to hitch rides to Canada. They walk together for several miles in the wrong direction before Sal gets a ride back to Harrisburg. Sal realizes after meeting the Ghost that the East holds just as much wilderness and mystery as the West. Hungry, Sal eventually gets a ride with a salesman who apparently believes in forced starvation as a health benefit. The man eventually relents and offers Sal some food and drives him all the way to New York.

Sal arrives in Times Square in New York, and he relishes the busyness of the city. He panhandles for a quarter to take the bus to his aunt's house in New Jersey. He has made it home just in time, before the cold of winter sets in. He begins to settle in to his former life of writing. His aunt tells him that Dean was at her house to stay a few nights just two days before, but Dean then set off for San Francisco, where his girl Camille has an apartment.

Analysis

Sal's arrival in San Francisco is met with great promise. His stay in Mill City, a city that houses both blacks and whites equally, is a promise of a progressive culture for Sal, an equality among human beings that he could not find in other places. His friendship with Remi Boncoeur (a name that means "good heart" in French) is emblematic of the hospitality that he expects to find in the city. But Sal eventually finds San Francisco to be just as lonely and conflicted as places in his previous travels. Remi and Lee Ann have a tumultuous relationship that is compounded by Sal's desire for Lee Ann. This highlights the theme of the separation between men and women, a theme throughout the novel that the reader encounters early with Sal's bad sexual experience with Rita Bettencourt. In the end, it is Remi's and Lee Ann's relationship, with Sal's unwillingness to conform to the codes of hospitality when meeting Remi's father, that causes the friendship to break apart.

Kerouac also deals with themes of authority and order in these chapters. Sal, having moved to San Francisco and needing money, takes a job as a security guard, a part of the police force. This kind of job represents a completely opposite lifestyle from the one he lived in Denver and hoped to find in San Francisco. His fellow guards, former policemen who keep to a strict regimen and take delight in enforcing the law and making arrests, are characters whom Sal does not understand in the book. There is a clear dividing line between Sal and Remi, who steal and gamble and participate in the unruly behavior of the sailors they are supposed to keep in check, and the other guards, who apparently want only to enforce the law and take part in the law's power and authority. Kerouac insinuates that the pressures of work to make money and to live a certain lifestyle are unjust, pushing people into roles they are not suited for. Sal and Remi rebel openly against the growing pressures of consumerism by taking advantage of their positions and stealing groceries from the barracks cafeteria, justifying the theft by quoting Truman's advice that Americans should live more frugally.

Sal's relationship with Terry, a Hispanic migrant worker fleeing from an abusive husband, is a turning point for him in the novel. This relationship moves Sal even farther from his middle-class New York upbringing and is his first experience with the "fellahin" lifestyle, the lifestyle and culture of marginalized people. Sal falls in love and begins to identify with this person of a different race. While Sal's behavior up to this point was not the usual behavior of someone from his background, this relationship was even more likely to have been looked down upon in his home; it marks a true separation from his life in New York and reflects his new life on the road.

Interestingly, in Los Angeles, the two lovers revert to stereotypes, Sal believing Terry to be a prostitute and Terry believing Sal to be a pimp. This illustrates the racial misunderstandings that existed at the time, which Sal and Terry have a hard time overcoming despite their growing love and lust. In the end, Sal interprets their dispute and distrust as a "fit of sickness" so that the two can reconcile-and make love.

The end of Part One of the novel finds Sal becoming part of the marginalized culture of Hispanic America before returning to his life in New York. By falling in love with Terry and becoming her provider and protector, Sal comes to identify himself as a Chicano migrant worker just like Terry. Sal, perhaps unwittingly, begins to encounter the racism of Los Angeles. He and Terry cannot get jobs in town, and they eventually have to head for the farm country of California to find the only jobs available to them, laboring jobs in the fields. Sal immerses himself in the migrant worker life, earning little more than a dollar a day picking cotton and living in a migrant worker tent village.

To this point in the novel, Sal had been purposefully rebelling from the comfort and status that his race provided for him. He could party and freeload off of friends up to this point because he knew that money was readily available when he needed it. Yet, when Sal becomes a part of the marginalized community of migrant workers, he finds he no longer is able to take those same privileges. Food and money run out, and because he now identifies himself as Hispanic (even though Terry's family does not identify him as such), he is forced to take the only work available to him. Yet, when the cold of the winter begins to set in, Sal recalls that he is allowed the privilege of leaving the fields. This is a privilege that Terry and Terry's son do not have, and she is forced to beg her family to take her back while Sal returns to his family as something of a prodigal son (more or less) in New York. The divide between the races that Sal and Terry first experienced in Los Angeles ultimately drives them back to their initial homes and cultures.

The pastoral passages of the cotton field are Kerouac's attempt to idealize, perhaps unconvincingly, the discrepancies and tensions between races at this point in American history. Sal's adventure as a migrant farm worker does not encompass the harshness and desperation of such work for most at the time, instead illustrating an idyllic picture of the hard work of migrants. Instead of becoming truly immersed in the hardships of the culture, Sal only plays the role of a migrant farm worker. It is a role that he knows he will eventually leave.

As Sal arrives back in New York, he finds that he has not fully developed into the person he wanted to become. He has missed Dean, the inspiration for the journey, and now finds himself confronted again with the life of work and family he attempted to leave behind. His return home ends his first journey and Part One of the novel, yet Dean has already gone on ahead.

A year passes. Sal finishes his novel and attends school on the GI Bill. Through writing to Dean in San Francisco, Sal learns that Dean is coming back East. In Testament, Virginia, while Sal and his aunt are visiting Southern relatives for Christmas, a '49 Hudson pulls up carrying Dean, Marylou, and Ed Dunkel. Sal is surprised and happy to see his friend. Dean soon volunteers to haul furniture for the family back to New Jersey.

Sal learns that Dean was living in San Francisco with Camille for the year. He and Ed Dunkel were working on the railroad, and when Dean saw the Hudson for sale he spent all his savings on it. Ed married a girl in San Francisco just so she would pay for the trip East, and thus they have headed to pick up Sal and return him to San Francisco. Ed's wife's money ran out by Tuscon, however, so the men left her in a motel and kept traveling, picking up various hitchhikers along the way to help pay for gas. Dean picked up Marylou, his former wife, in Denver. They decided that this time "they were going to stick." Through accidents and snowstorms the group made its way across the country and eventually to Sal's relatives' house in Virginia.

Sal, Dean, Ed, and Marylou head to downtown Testament to buy supplies for their trip. Dean is as compulsive and frenzied as ever. As the group returns to Sal's relatives' house, Sal realizes that he although he had been spending a quiet Christmas in the country, "the bug was on me again, and the bug's name was Dean Moriarty." They load Dean's car with furniture and begin to drive the thousand miles to New Jersey.

Sal tells the group about a girl he has been dating, Lucille, and talks about wanting to maybe get married and settle down. The group ends up eating free hamburgers in a diner after the owner asks them to wash the dishes. After driving through New York City, they head for Sal's aunt's house in New Jersey and sleep. In the morning, Sal gets a call from Ed's forgotten wife, Galatea. She had made it to New Orleans and was looking for Ed. Sal promises they will pick her up on their way back to San Francisco. The group meets up with Carlo Marx, who "quieted down" since the Denver days and now relates stories of a trip he took to Africa. After a quick meal of rice, Dean and Sal drive back to Virginia to pick up Sal's aunt and the rest of the furniture.

During the overnight drive to Virginia, Sal and Dean talk about the existence of God, his reformed behavior from his youth, and about how Dean was now a mystic. On the trip back to New Jersey, with Sal's aunt in the car, they get pulled over by a Washington police officer. With no money to pay the speeding fine, Sal's aunt has to pay. Sal's aunt believes that the world will never find peace until "men fell at their women's feet and asked for forgiveness." This exclamation causes Dean and Sal to reflect on how they do not understand the women in their lives. They arrive in New Jersey, where Sal's aunt cooks a meal for everybody.

Sal, Dean, and Ed head into New York to find a place to live for a while. While driving in, Sal becomes haunted by the idea that he forgot something-a decision he was supposed to make before Dean arrived. The decision had to do with the Shrouded Traveler, a figure in a dream whom Sal decides represents death. Dean thinks the Shrouded Traveler represents a "pure death," the state of bliss experienced first in the womb and not again until a person dies. Dean decides he will have nothing to do with this kind of death, and Sal agrees with him.

They begin to visit friends in New York for the New Year's weekend. They party for three days. Lucille, Sal's girlfriend, becomes distressed when she sees how crazy Dean makes Sal. Marylou, realizing that Dean is going back to Camille in San Francisco, tries to get Sal to be her man, but he refuses. Sal realizes his affair with Lucille cannot last much longer because she wants things "her way" and Sal is not ready to give up his life of traveling. The New Year's parties get bigger and bigger, and a cast of characters and New York friends come in and out, including Rollo Greb, a beatnik scholar who Dean believes "get(s) it." When Sal tries to find out what "it" is, Dean's only response is "IT! IT!"

During the weekend, Sal and Dean visit a jazz club to see a musician Dean says also has "it." The musician, a blind piano player named Shearing, enraptures Dean and Sal, partly because of his playing and partly because of the marijuana they are smoking. When Shearing is finished, Dean points to his empty chair and exclaims, "God's empty chair ...." Sal feels the madness of the weekend overcoming him.

After a rest at his aunt's house, Sal decides to go back West with Dean, partly to see what "Dean was going to do" and partly so that he can try to have an affair with Marylou once Dean goes back to Camille. The group spends a few more days in Carlo Marx's apartment where Carlo lectures them on what they are making of their lives; Carlo talks to them about his new role as "The Voice of Rock"-a new period of madness for Carlo. One night in a "hoodlum" bar, Dean proposes that Sal try to sleep with Marylou, just so that Dean can know what she is like with another man. They drive back to the apartment and wake Marylou. While Dean watches, Sal and Marylou try to make love, but Sal confesses he wants to wait until they get to San Francisco because his "heart isn't in it." Dean returns and makes love to Marylou, an act that Sal believes is Dean's attempt to realize the "origins of life-bliss," a need he developed from his neglectful parents and his time in prison.

The group call their friend Old Bull Lee in New Orleans, who has been taking care of Ed's abandoned wife, and they promise they are coming to get her. Sal tells his aunt goodbye and that he will be back in two weeks-and the group is off for California.

Back on the road, Sal realizes the group is "performing our one and noble function of the time, move." Dean encourages the others to forget their worries and fights of the past and to focus on the good time they will be having in New Orleans. Dean and Marylou make plans to sneak around behind Camille's back when they get to California, and Sal realizes he is not going to get to "make it" with Marylou after all.

They arrive in Washington, D.C., on the day of Harry Truman's second inauguration and watch a military parade go down Pennsylvania Avenue. They get pulled over again in Washington, and the cops try to put Dean and Marylou in jail under the Mann Act, a 1944 law that prohibits the transport of women for prostitution. The cops threaten them but end up only giving Dean a $25 fine. Sal accuses the police in America of being engaged in psychological warfare against its citizens, making up crimes and invading people's privacy.

In Virginia, they pick up a Jewish hitchhiker before they reach Testament. The hitchhiker says he will get the group some money, but he never shows back up, so they leave. The group drive through the South stealing gasoline and cigarettes. In Alabama Dean begins telling stories of his childhood. They arrive in New Orleans to the sound of jazz music on the radio. They take in the sights and smells of the South and of New Orleans and exclaim their love for women. They find Old Bull Lee's house outside of town. Ed and Galatea, his forgotten wife, are reunited. Bull Lee is a schizophrenic drug addict who held a myriad of odd jobs all over the world, but he is warm and cordial to the "maniacs" he finds when he comes home. Sal relates several old tales about Bull Lee: he had studied multiple disciplines all over the world and now wanders the streets of New Orleans with different shady characters feeding his Benzedrine habit.

Bull Lee takes the group into New Orleans, but they hit only the "dull bars in the French Quarter." They cross the Mississippi on a ferry, and a girl commits suicide on the boat. Back at Bull's house Marylou takes every drug that Bull will give her, and the rest of the group get high on marijuana. Sal tries to take a walk to the river but cannot reach it because of a fence. With a volume of Kafka on his lap, Bull Lee muses, "When you start separating the people from their rivers" what you get is "Bureaucracy!"

Analysis

Part Two begins with Sal's rebirth from his family life to his life on the road once again as Ed, Dean, and Marylou arrive to take Sal back West. These first three chapters begin to explore the notion of male freedom within the structures of heterosexual family and marriage that defined this time period of the Forties and Fifties. Dean and Ed treat Ed's wife as disposable, leaving her in a hotel on the journey, and Dean leaves Camille, his love interest from earlier, to return to his wife Marylou. Dean comments that he truly does want real love, but he only wants it "free of hassles," meaning the freedom to come and go and do as he pleases. In On the Road women are portrayed as being able to provide food, shelter, sex, and warmth at their own cost and in exchange for both freedom and adventure for men. There is no sense of commitment in Dean's life, and Sal follows this lead by giving up his dreams of marriage and family with Lucille to follow Dean on the road. In Sal's eyes, Dean has transformed in a year from a merely excited individual to an ecstatic prophet. His thoughts and actions take on religious significance in Sal's eyes. Dean's presence interrupts the quiet family gathering in Virginia, and Dean, also likened by Sal to a virus, brings Sal back to the road.

Themes of matriarchal rule also come up in these chapters. After the speeding ticket, Sal's aunt is the one who takes control, paying the fine and returning home to cook and care for the young people. Just as Kerouac did in his real life, Sal is caught in the position of assigning roles to women-either of mothers or of sexual objects-making it unclear how he will achieve true love and marriage.

The reader gets a further glimpse into the racial fascination that Kerouac develops throughout the novel. Dean dances to a Bebop record that Sal has bought, and he idolizes an old black man riding a mule on a farm. Carlo took a trip to Africa, where he immersed himself in African culture. Kerouac suggests that black culture carries forward certain truths that white American culture has lost. As in Part One, when Sal idealized migrant farm life, the theme of race and its interplay with "It" plays an important role and will continue to do so.

With the return of Dean and the promise of another adventure out West, both Sal's life and Kerouac's narrative begin to increase in disorder. Kerouac's writing begins to take on a more frenzied nature, emblematic of the characters he is describing. His sentences often run into each other without punctuation, and he jumps from theme to theme, sometimes within the same paragraph or the same sentence. As with the writing, Sal's life becomes more frenzied and disordered. The sexual lives of Kerouac's characters become entangled with each other as Sal and Dean want to exchange lovers and Dean propositions Sal to sleep with Marylou while he watches.

Sal's philosophy of life also becomes darker and more disordered. He relates his vision of the Shrouded Traveler, a representative of death. Dean, having become more intense since the earlier chapters, assures Sal that one can reach a true understanding of life if one only moves fast enough. Kerouac suggests that his characters are trying to take on immortality by the very speed and pace of their lives as well as through their travels. Dean's motto for life and path to immortality is twofold: move and don't worry.

This quest for immortality and individuality is arrested, however, by the police and military presence the travelers encounter in Washington. As Bull Lee comments at the end of chapter six, this "bureaucracy" intrudes into people's lives and keeps them from expressing themselves and living life to its fullest. The group's reaction to these machines of war parading in Washington and the police that later pull them over shows just how removed they have become from mainstream American values.

Arriving in New Orleans, Sal and Dean are once again excited by the novelty of the African American culture in which they hope to participate. They meet up with Bull Lee, a character modeled after the legendary Beat poet William S. Burroughs, who models an eccentric, drug-addled lifestyle for the group. The stay at Bull Lee's only intensifies the disorder taking over on this trip out West. The Mississippi River makes another appearance in the novel as gateway to the West. Sal begins to create an American mythology out of the river as both a chance at new life, symbolized by his crossing of the great river, and as a peril of death, symbolized by the oft-used literary trope of the girl who commits suicide.

In the morning, Old Bull Lee, Sal, and Dean attempt to pull nails out of an old piece of wood. This gives Bull time to talk about his theories of government conspiracy, his crazy relatives, and his invention for warding off cancer. In the afternoon Bull and Sal go to a "bookie joint" to gamble, where Sal has a vision in which a racing horse reminds him of his father. On the way home, Bull tells Sal that he believes mankind will soon realize they can talk to the dead.

Back at Bull's house, the travelers compete in athletic competitions like running and jumping, and Dean wins them all. After an afternoon in New Orleans where Dean shows Sal the ins and outs of the rail yard, the group say farewell to the Lees and leave New Orleans. Sal muses about the feeling of seeing someone become smaller as you drive away until they are just specks on the horizon.

They stop at a filling station and steal more food, gas, and cigarettes because they only have just enough money to get to San Francisco. As they enter the swamps of Louisiana, they become frightened and awed by the night and the wild forest surrounding them. Exiting the swamp, they can see the oil tanks and refineries of Texas. They enter Houston, and Dean tells stories of his Houston days with Bull Lee and Carlo Marx. Sal takes over driving through Texas in the rain and gets the car stuck in mud after a car full of drunk field workers runs them off the road. The next day there is snow on the ground, and Marylou tempts Sal with promises of a relationship in San Francisco. They drive all the way to El Paso, stopping only once for Dean to take off all his clothes and run through the fields of sagebrush. Dean convinces Sal and Marylou to take off their clothes as well, and they all sit in the front seat together and drive on.

In El Paso Dean takes off to "dig the streets" and leaves Sal and Marylou alone in the car. She tries again to come on to him, but he wants to wait until Frisco. Marylou confesses her confusion over her love for Dean and how she is sure he is going to leave her. Dean picks up a hitchhiker, and they decide to go to Tucson, Arizona, where a friend of Sal's owes him five dollars.

In Arizona Sal pawns his pocket watch for a dollar of gas money, and a cop stops them to check their papers. Dean comments that the cops are always skeptical of groups of young people who come into town and start pawning their possessions. In Tucson they meet up with Sal's friend Hingham, a writer, who gives Sal five dollars and feeds the group. As they leave Hingham, Sal again thinks about watching his friends become smaller as they drive away.

They pick up another hitchhiker, a musician, who promises them money in Bakersfield. They roll into California, and Dean tells stories about his days in Bakersfield. The hitchhiker finds his brother in Bakersfield and gives the group money for gas. They drive the rest of the way to San Francisco, where Sal and Marylou get stranded on the street with no money for a hotel room while Dean makes arrangements with Camille.

Having been abandoned by Dean, Sal and Marylou get a hotel room on credit and scrounge for food. Sal realizes Marylou has no real feelings for him and was only trying to get to Dean through him. As they lie in bed at night, and Sal tells myths of God and Satan that he has conjured up. When Marylou leaves him for a club owner, Sal wanders the streets of San Francisco, where he has visions of his past and of reincarnation.

Dean, who has taken a job as a door-to-door salesman, finally takes Sal back in. After a few days of selling steam cookers, Dean and Sal become tired of life and Dean quits his job. They become "mad" again, however, when they go to a show by a jazz musician/performance artist named Slim Gaillard. Later, Sal and Dean experience the "madness" of African American jazz all over the Bay area. Sal finally becomes overwhelmed and tired by the scene and catches a bus back to New York, "thinking we'd never see one another again and we didn't care."

Analysis

The continuing trip to San Francisco gives Sal time to think about the transitory nature of life. Watching his friends fade away in the rear window of a car makes Sal realize the flow of time and the process of continual loss. It is a feeling that Sal finds both futile and liberating. For Dean, it becomes a necessity to retell the stories of his past as they drive through the towns of Texas and into California. The stories are often amoral and shocking, especially when the reader keeps in mind the cultural sensibilities of the 1950s when On the Road was published. These stories are Dean's own way of dealing with the idea of impermanence.

The group's journey through the Louisiana swamps is again a way in which Kerouac mythologizes black culture in America. The group longs to find a jazz club in the swamp to experience this culture, but they end up being just as frightened of the swamp as they are excited by it. As Sal, Dean, and Marylou continue to drive west (Ed and Galatea Dunkel have disappeared from the narrative, apparently staying in New Orleans), Dean's behavior becomes even more erratic, driving naked and talking nonsense.

Once they reach San Francisco, Sal and Marylou find the town not as exciting or accommodating as they had hoped. They end up being left broke and homeless as Dean abandons them for other adventures. Unlike his earlier experience, Sal now only sees the "disenchanted" and sad side of San Francisco.

Hungry and abandoned in San Francisco, Sal has a vision on the streets that begins to grasp the truth he has been searching for in his journeys. In this vision of reincarnation and divinity, Sal begins to see the fluidity, not permanence, of time. Many of the themes of this passage use Buddhist notions, ideas that would gain more importance in Kerouac's later work. Throughout the novel, Sal's character has been increasingly fluid in his identity: he has been a hobo, a traveler, a prophet, a family member, and so on. It is in this passage of visions that Sal begins to grasp the notion of his identity as being truly fluid.

In the final chapter of this second part, Dean takes Sal back in, but Dean's character has also changed. No longer a wild, amoral youth of the road, Dean has come back to San Francisco to provide for a family, take a job, and become stable. Yet, this new role for Dean cannot last long, and it is only a few days later that Sal and Dean lie around Dean's house, "sick and tired of everything."

It is, again, the underground jazz of African American culture that drives Sal and Dean "mad" again and renews their faith in life. Kerouac's prose takes on the unresolved, confused nature of the music itself as he attempts to describe several of these African American characters and the madness that they bring with them. After an exhausting night out in which Dean, Marylou, and Sal "hit ... the Negro jazz shacks," Sal decides to head back east. Sal is now burned out by the frantic pace of his travels.

Part Three begins in the spring of 1949. Sal moves to Denver, even though none of his friends remains there, and gets a job in a fruit market. He has ideas of settling down in Denver, becoming a "patriarch." He is lonely and wanders the streets of Denver, wishing that he were another race: black, Mexican, or Japanese. He hates being a white man and despises the life his race has given him. A "rich girl" whom Sal knows gives him one hundred dollars to go to Frisco, so he gets a ride with a travel bureau car and takes off back towards the West. At two o'clock in the morning, Sal arrives in Frisco and immediately goes to Dean's house to find out "what was on his mind." Dean answers the door naked, and the two begin talking in order to "get with it."

Sal's presence in the house causes a disruption for Camille. Dean had begun to settle down, but with Sal's arrival Camille knows that the madness will take him over again. Dean recounts his past year in Frisco: after stalking Marylou, he smoked some bad marijuana and had visions and nightmares in which the truth of his life came to him. He decided that he was love with Marylou and was going to have to kill her. After a standoff with a gun in which Dean declared that one of them must die, Marylou talked Dean out of his madness. Later, Marylou married a used-car dealer and Dean did not see her anymore. Dean hurt his hand trying to hit Marylou in the face, and an infection has caused it to become slightly deformed. Dean tells Sal of all his illnesses and sicknesses and about his daughter and domestic life. Dean seems to have finally settled down.

But Camille comes home one day to find her house and family in disarray. She throws Sal and Dean out. Sal realizes that Dean's broken thumb and bandaged hand represents what Dean has become, someone who "no longer cared about anything (as before) but now ... also cared about everything in principle ...." Dean simply takes life as it comes to him. Sal and Dean talk about going to New York and then to Italy on the money that Sal can get from his publisher for the book he just submitted. The two friends share an unspoken moment together in which they both realize their lives are intrinsically tied together before boarding a trolley-determined to get to Italy.

Dean and Sal go to a bar, where they make plans "to do everything we'd never done and had been too silly to do in the past." First, they call their friend Roy Johnson to chauffeur them around for a two day "kick" in San Francisco before they leave for New York. They try to find Remi Boncoeur, but he is no longer in the shack in Mill City. They go to Ed Dunkel's house, but he has left Galatea again and is in Denver. Eventually the new group-Sal, Dean, Galatea, Marie (a girl Dean picks up), and Roy Johnson and his wife Dorothy-end up sitting around Galatea's apartment, sullen at the disarray of their lives.

The women harass Dean for his irresponsibility and the mess he has made of Marylou and Camille's lives. Sal describes it as a maternal instinct, harassing Dean the way a mother would an "errant child." Dean does not care and just giggles and dances at their insults. Sal realizes that Dean has become the "HOLY GOOF," the "Idiot." Yet, Sal also begins to compare Dean to a holy teacher and this group of friends to Dean's disciples. As the insults keep flying, Dean finally becomes "BEAT-the root, the soul of Beatific," as Sal says. He does not attempt to talk or party his way out of the troubles that have come his way. Sal tries to convince the group to go hear jazz and forget Dean and the troubles he brings. He also tries to convince them to follow Dean because he knows they "want to know what he does next and that's because he's got the secret that we're all busting to find." The others object, calling Dean nothing more than a con man.

The group eventually leave and find an African American jazz club, where they party and dance. Sal describes the madness of the club and Dean's intensity, matched only by that of a "tenorman" who drives the music of the club. The tenorman's son shows up and takes his father, Sal, and Dean to another jazz club called Jamsono's Nook, where they find a musician who reminds them of Carlo Marx. Roy Johnson picks them up and takes them to another club before heading home at dawn. Dean and Sal go home with another musician to drink beer and tell stories. Dean praises the musician's wife because she never had a harsh word for her husband even though he came home at dawn after a night of drinking. Dean and Sal call up one of Dean's railroading friends to sleep in his room. The next morning Sal gets their bags from Galatea's, and they prepare to take off for New York.

During their first ride, Sal and Dean sit in the back seat of a Chrysler and talk about the jazz men they saw last night. Dean says that the tenorman had "it" and begins to explain to Sal what "it" is. He describes "it" as a sensation of being out of time and body, in touch with an infinite soul within himself and within everyone else. In the backseat Dean and Sal swap excited stories of their childhoods, both feeling that they have "IT." Dean tells of his days with his father, the bum, and Sal tells stories of riding in the back seats of cars and dreaming of horses. When the car stops in Sacramento, the driver, a homosexual, tries to seduce Dean, but Dean talks him into letting him drive the next day, and the group starts making good time towards Denver.

Dean's reckless driving scares the other passengers in the car, but Sal and Dean do not care and instead talk incessantly about life and the meaning of things. In Salt Lake City, the place that Dean was born, Dean has a revelation about how "People change, they eat meals year after year and change with every meal." After switching drivers a few times, the car finally makes it to Denver. Dean and Sal are left on the side of a street.

Analysis

This part begins with Sal's journey to Denver to start his life again. He sees himself as a kind of "patriarch" but quickly finds that without his friends in town, life becomes boring-he knows he must go to San Francisco. Before leaving, though, Sal takes a walk through the African American parts of Denver and, with jealousy, longs for the life of another culture. It is in this part that Kerouac sees the hope and promise of individuality and freedom not in the dominant white culture of America but in the excluded groups of minority America. Sal believes that it is these minority groups that retain the true individuality and freedom that make America a great land. It is significant that On the Road is published just as the civil rights movement is beginning. For Sal, however, the racism and exclusion in America provide a route to true freedom and happiness.

As Sal leaves for San Francisco, he feels liberated from his past in a way that he had not previously felt. As Sal arrives in San Francisco, he finds Dean more broken than before, his broken thumb (a hitchhiking necessity) a symbol of the toll conventional life takes on a man. When Camille becomes frustrated with Dean's growing madness and kicks Sal and Dean out of the house, Dean and Sal find the fault for such behavior with Camille, a matriarchal figure who only wants to spoil their fun. This scene once again demonstrates Dean's and Sal's inability to understand women as equal partners in their journey, although one wonders about the roles of nature and nurture in the conflict between the sexes. Why is it that the men find it so much easier and enjoyable to go on the road? Do the women who travel with them count as equal partners?

Gender issues continue to play an important role as this section unfolds. During their two day "kick" in San Francisco, Sal and Dean, who have committed to be buddies for the rest of their lives, meet up with Galatea Dunkel. She again has been "given the slip" by Ed. It is at Galatea's house that Galatea, who was not afraid of Dean, confronts him about his behavior and lack of responsibility towards women. Instead of reforming Dean, however, this derision causes Dean to take on a kind of saintliness, at least in Sal's eyes. Confronting these harsh words makes Dean the prototype for what "Beat" is: a person who will sacrifice anything and anybody to find a true yet impermanent identity, a person who finds "it."

The next scenes take the men and women back to the streets of San Francisco and into the jazz clubs. Any notions of responsibility and respectability are forgotten as the travelers party and dance through the night. Here, Kerouac's writing most takes on the form of the jazz music he loves. His sentences run on and are interspersed with words that describe the sounds and rhythms of the club. There is little narrative in this section, mostly description of the frantic and wild jazz club and the music that drove these men mad. African American culture is again idolized, and the jazz musician whom Dean and Sal go home with seems to have the perfect situation, a wife who does not complain about his behavior.

As the two begin their journey to New York, a discussion about "it" from the previous night comes back up in the back seat of the car they are sharing. Dean compares and contrasts "it" to the fury of the jazz music the night before and with the conventional worries and problems of their fellow travelers. It is clear from this passage that ordinary people who live conventional lives do not have "it." In the stories that the two tell each other, time again plays a role. They are unable to truly capture the past and thus choose to be spontaneous in the present.

At a diner in Denver, Dean makes a crack about Sal's age (he is a few years older than Dean), and Sal gets angry at Dean. Dean gets so upset that he goes outside to cry. Sal, feeling awful over the incident, apologizes. The two share a sad moment in the diner. Sal realizes again that he does not know who he is anymore.

Sal and Dean stay with Sal's former neighbors, a group of Okies (poor white people displaced from Oklahoma during the Depression). Dean gets in a fight with the Okie mother trying to help her buy a car. She is too indecisive for him and reminds him of his father's behavior. Dean begins looking for his father but does not find him, only finding rumors that he is working in a train yard in New England. Dean's cousin, Sam Brady, is coming into town, and Dean has to prepare Sal for his arrival. Sam was a bootlegger from Missouri who was one of the only members of Dean's family who showed him affection and care. Sal wants to know what kind of scam Dean is going to pull on his cousin, but Dean replies that there is no scam. He just wants to catch up with his cousin and remember moments from his childhood.

Dean's cousin arrives and tells him that he does not drink anymore and has found religion. He drives Dean and Sal around Denver but tells Dean the only reason he is seeing him is that he wants him to sign a paper that cuts Dean and his father out of the family will. Dean is disheartened by this news, but he continues to get excited by the stories his cousin tells him about the past. When Sam drops the two off, Sal tells Dean he is sorry that nobody believes in him-but that he will always believe in him. The two go to a carnival, where Dean thinks he is falling in love with a three-foot woman but cannot get up the courage to talk to her. When they return to the Okies' house, Dean lusts after the Okie mother's thirteen-year-old daughter.

The next day the two go to downtown Denver, where Dean steals a softball. They return to the Okies' house and start getting drunk on bourbon. Dean tries to "make it" with one of the neighbors but scares her by throwing pebbles at her windows. She starts to come after the two with a shotgun, but Sal diffuses the situation. Dean, Sal, and the Okie family then leave to get drunk at a bar. At the bar, things get frantic when Dean steals a car, goes to downtown Denver, steals another car, and then comes back. The cops show up and start investigating. Dean starts stealing more cars and eventually leaves one in the front yard of the Okie family before he passes out. Sal has to wake Dean, and they dump the stolen car so that no one will know Dean stole it.

In the morning Dean realizes the car he stole had belonged to a police detective and that the Denver police have records of his fingerprints from previous arrests. Sal and Dean decide they need to get out of town fast, so they pack their bags and say goodbye to the Okie family, a group whom Sal has come to regard as "our sweet little family." They call a cab, and after a brief scare in which Sal thinks the cab is a police cruiser, they get to Denver and catch a ride at the travel bureau.

At the travel bureau, Sal and Dean take an offer to drive a man's '47 Cadillac limousine to Chicago for him. Dean immediately begins making plans for the car in Denver (picking up women with it), but Sal is unsure. After picking up one woman and having quick sex with her, Dean picks up Sal and two boys from an Eastern Jesuit school for the road to Chicago. Two miles outside of Denver, Dean breaks the speedometer because he is driving over 110 miles per hour. Dean decides to visit his friend Ed Wall on his ranch in Colorado, but he runs the limo off a dirt road and into a ditch. A farmer helps them get the car out of the ditch, and they drive to Ed Wall's ranch while Dean tells stories of his days as a ranch hand. At Wall's ranch they eat and try to convince him that Sal owns the Cadillac and is a rich man. Wall does not believe it and thinks Dean stole the car. Like Dean's cousin, Ed Wall also has lost faith in Dean and is more concerned about his livestock than the adventures the two are having.

That night the travelers speed through Nebraska at 110 miles per hour. Dean tells Sal about a road that goes all the way through Mexico and to South America. They dream about arriving in Chicago. Dean relates stories of his past travels, getting arrested, escaping, and meeting Marylou in Los Angeles when she was fifteen. In Iowa, they get into a race with a Buick and have fantasies that they are Chicago gangsters coming into town from a trip to LA. Dean is driving recklessly through Iowa, and Sal cannot stand it anymore. He climbs into the back seat so he does not have to watch. In Des Moines, Dean gets into a fender bender but thinks he has things straightened out with the other driver. On the other side of Des Moines, however, they get pulled over and detained because the driver complained he had been in a hit and run. The mess is straightened out after a call to the Cadillac's owner.

Dean continues to drive recklessly at 110 miles per hour, almost getting into a five-car crash on a small bridge in Illinois. Sal has a vision of a jazz clarinetist who recently died in a car crash in Illinois. As they pull into Chicago, Sal again compares the group to gangsters coming from LA to "contest the spoils of Chicago." Once they get to their destination, Sal realizes they made it from Denver to Chicago, not counting the accidents and the stop at Ed Wall's ranch, in only seventeen hours.

In Chicago, Sal and Dean freshen up at a room in the YMCA and then head out to see the sights of the town. They follow a jazz band, and Sal recounts a brief history of jazz up to his present day. They follow the band to a different bar and listen to them until nine in the morning, taking only brief intermissions to get back in the Cadillac and try to pick up girls. Back at the bar, Sal and Dean listen to George Shearing, the musician Dean had named "God" in San Francisco. After Shearing, the jazz band realizes there is nothing left to play, but they try anyway. In the morning they return the Cadillac, dirty and busted, and get back to Chicago quickly before anyone can complain.

On a bus to Detroit Sal talks with a lonely country girl who has no plans for her life, nor does she know what plans her family has. Sal decides the girl is lost. In Detroit they sleep in an all-night movie theater. Sal becomes sick of life, deciding he is nothing more than a piece of garbage in the theater. In the morning they get a ride with a family man at the travel bureau who charges them four dollars a piece for the ride to New York. They drive overnight and in the morning get to New York. They go to Sal's aunt's new flat on Long Island, where they stay. They go to parties in New York. At one party, Sal introduces Dean to a woman named Inez. They have a quick affair from which she gets pregnant. The section ends with Inez and Camille both giving birth to Dean's children, albeit in different cities. Dean now has four children all over the country and no money. Sal and Dean decide not to go to Italy after all.

Analysis

Sal's and Dean's philosophy of life, which took a greater form in the first chapters of part three, is now unleashed into the world through their travels unlike it had been before. Dean's notion is to live as spontaneously as possible in order to ignore, or transcend, the worries and responsibilities of life. Yet, as the two reach Denver, the consequences of living in such a way begin to confront them.

In Denver, Dean begins to try to satisfy whatever urge or lust comes into his mind. As they begin drinking heavily, Dean's lust causes him to stalk a young neighbor. The mother of the girl greets the two with a shotgun while a group of boys are ready to fight them, and Sal has to talk their way out of the mess. Dean begins stealing cars and eventually steals the wrong car, the car of a police detective, and by the time they are leaving Denver, Sal realizes that once again, things are a "mess." As they leave Denver, running from enemies and the police, Kerouac seems to be urging the reader to approach Dean's philosophy of life with caution.

When Dean and Sal get the Cadillac limousine that will carry them to Chicago, Kerouac begins using metaphors that echo Melville's Moby Dick. As Dean drives madly across the Midwest, Sal compares him to a "mad Ahab at the wheel." Like Moby Dick, On the Road is a first-person narrative about an extraordinary journey that takes place on the fringes of American society and deals with race and companionship.

In Detroit, Sal comes to face his own identity. Broke and tired at the movie theater, Sal's dreams and images of Hollywood play all night, beginning to merge and form together in his consciousness. It is in the movie theater where Sal notices the most "beat" of all the characters in the novel, in a sense-the homeless and destitute of Detroit-and the juxtaposition of the false reality of Hollywood and the true reality of this underbelly of America contrast sharply. Sal begins to identify most closely with the "garbage" he sees around him. He feels completely rejected by society and no better than the trash that litters the theater. Unlike the New York intellectual crowd that characterized "beat" at the beginning of the novel, this scene most fully identifies what Sal (and thus Kerouac, it seems) has come to view as the true "beat" culture of America.

The remaining journey to New York is uneventful, and Sal arrives back at his aunt's house, the constant haven for food and shelter. Dean does not seem to change; he again continues his own journey, finding another woman and having another child. As the section ends, Sal muses on Dean's responsibilities and the children Dean fathered all over the country. Part Three ends with a note of sadness in realizing the consequences of constantly living in the moment. But, true to himself, why should Dean worry about the consequences?

Part Four, Sal's and Dean's final journey, begins with Sal telling the reader that he came into some money by selling the novel he had been working on in the previous parts of the book. It is spring, and Sal again feels the need to travel. This time, however, he sets out without Dean, leaving him at his job at a parking garage in New York-still living a domestic life with Inez in New York. Before he leaves, Sal and Dean talk about their lives in New York. Dean seems to have found some happiness with Inez, a woman who lets him get his "kicks" with a "minimum of trouble." Dean tells Sal they should eventually grow old and be bums. After a final Sunday afternoon in which they play ball with neighborhood boys, Dean repays the fifteen dollars he has owed Sal's aunt from the speeding ticket she paid, and she feeds the two a big meal during which she tries to compel Dean to stay married and take care of his children. The two say goodbye to each other. Sal tells Dean that he hopes they can one day settle down with their families on the same street-an image of domesticity they had been running from for the whole novel.

Sal takes a bus to Washington, ranging about the South, visiting Stonewall Jackson's grave, then the Midwest, and finally gets to Denver with a friend he makes on the bus, Henry Glass, a young kid just released from prison. Sal takes Henry under his wing and escorts him to Denver, where Henry's brother has a job for him that will help him stay out of trouble. In Denver, they meet up with old friends Tim Gray and Stan Shephard. Stan wants to follow Sal to Mexico, and the two agree to travel together.

Sal stays with his old friends, Tim and Babe Rollins, for a week in Denver. They party and visit the jazz clubs and make preparations for the trip to Mexico. As he gets ready to leave, Sal gets word that Dean bought a car and is on his way to Denver, supposedly to drive Sal to Mexico. At that moment, Sal has a vision: Dean is the Shrouded Traveler, a "burning shuddering frightful Angel," blazing across the Midwest leaving death and destruction in his wake. Sal is uncertain about Dean's arrival, fearing for the children he is leaving behind and the money they will not get because he spent his savings on a car. Sal realizes that everything about the trip must now change with Dean's arrival.

When Dean does finally show up, they rearrange their plans for Mexico and Sal admits that he feels all right with Dean's arrival. Sal adds that he cannot help but follow him wherever he goes. They spend a night in Denver at the Dunkels' house, reunited with their old friends. The Dunkels talk about their plans for the future, going back to school and settling down with family. Dean's madness, for the first time, seems out of place at the party. He attempts to entertain and infuse the party with wildness, as he had done in the past, but his presence only makes his old friends uncomfortable. The group migrates to the Windsor Hotel bar, where Dean and Sal get "fumingly" drunk. Sal breaks one of his fingers punching a door but does not realize it until the next day.

The next day they map their trip to Mexico, the "magic south." Dean declares that this is the trip that will finally take them to "it." Stan says tearful goodbyes to his overprotective family, and the rest say goodbye to their Denver friends. Sal, Dean, and Stan take off for Mexico.

Three miles outside of town, a bug stings Stan in the arm while they are driving, causing it to swell. They decide to stop at a hospital to get Stan's arm checked out. As they drive, they recount the stories of their lives, Dean instructing Stan to "deal with every single detail." They drive through Texas, taking in the sights of the prairies and plains. Stan relates his travels in Europe, and soon they are rolling into San Antonio, where they stop at a hospital for Stan's arm. After he gets a shot of penicillin, they go with Dean to check out the pool halls of San Antonio. Dean says he is high on the air of San Antonio.

They drive the rest of the way to the Mexican border by Laredo, Texas. At three in the morning they cross the border, where they discover that Mexico "looked exactly like Mexico." Dean and Sal are in awe of the men in straw hats lounging before battered storefronts. The border police check their baggage, and they exchange their dollars for pesos, excited to finally be in Mexico.

Analysis

Sal's and Dean's final journey, in Part Four, takes them to Mexico to truly experience the marginal culture that they have expounded about and idealized throughout the novel. It is not African American culture, but it is a subculture all the same, even though for the Mexicans, their own culture is itself the dominant one. That is the point: finding a society where people can do what they want without worry.

The goodbye that Sal and Dean share in New York illustrates the ironies of their carefree choices. Sal says goodbye with the hope that the two will one day settle down with families into a quiet domesticity, the kind of life the two have been rejecting since their first travels. Dean, meanwhile, hopes that he and Sal will one day grow old together as bums, dropping completely out of society, not interfering with anyone and not being interfered with by anyone. As this new journey begins, Sal begins to confront his growing maturity (after all this time) to become distrustful of Dean's lack of conventionality. Yet, Sal is the one who is on the road.

Sal's budding maturity is seen further as he becomes a brief father figure to Henry Glass, the young ex-convict on his way to a job in Denver. Glass is the next generation-is it better to advise him to be a beatnik or not?

When Sal learns that Dean is coming to Denver, supposedly to drive him to Mexico, Sal has a vision of Dean as the Shrouded Traveler from Part Two. In part, this vision instills in the reader the kind of awe and legend that Dean's own friends felt for his arrival. In another sense, it is Sal's last apprehension about once again becoming overwhelmed and sucked into Dean's madness, a state he once longed for but now is not so sure he wants to participate in. Yet, when Dean arrives, Sal forgets his apprehension and they plan their trip to Mexico, a trip they believe will finally illuminate "it" for them.

Sal again feels a kind of momentary separation anxiety as he watches Tim Gray recede in the distance, just as he watched previous friends recede. He compares the city of Denver to the sinking city of Atlantis. This section of the novel, the closing journey, is filled with apocalyptic imagery, and Sal compares himself to the biblical wife of Lot from Genesis, looking back on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. They have escaped the destruction of the evil cities, but Lot's wife looks back wistfully; her place is there.

As the group cross the Mexican border, Sal's sense of doom is replaced with the rush of the present. He describes Laredo, Texas, as the dregs of America, not just because it is one of the geographically lowest or most southern points in America, but also calling to mind the night in the Detroit theater in which Sal compared himself to the garbage of the place. Once over the border, they spot the Mexican culture that surrounds them, so they can easily forget such feelings as left behind in the United States. Instead, the excitement of travel resumes.

For Sal and Dean, Mexico is a "magic" land, full of cheap beer and cheap cigarettes. They are ecstatic at the world they have found, a world at "the end of the road." They drive through Mexico, excited at the prospect of getting to Mexico City and the adventures they will have while there. They pass through towns full of poor field workers, but the scene excites them. They feel they have found a true land of the "beat," people unencumbered by the trappings of money and work and white America.

They drive through many Mexican towns, taking turns at the wheel so that they can take in the sights and sounds of the people and the terrain of Mexico. They are fascinated by the way of life here and do not want to miss any of it. In Gregoria, a small Mexican town, they stop and meet Victor, a Mexican guy who says he can get them girls and marijuana. Victor's mother grows the drugs in her backyard, and Victor rolls the largest joint Sal has ever seen, a cigar-sized joint. They all smoke it on Victor's porch, immediately getting very high. They all get so high that they have trouble talking to each other.

Victor leads the group to the girls. Sal is so high that he begins having hallucinations in which Dean looks like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and God. He has visions of Mexico, hallucinations where he sees gold pour from the sky. Victor shows the group his baby son, and they all feel mournful desires for family and children-then they head for the whorehouse.

At the brothel, the three are treated like kings. The proprietor puts on Mambo music at their request, and they dance with the girls while the town watches through the windows. They drink and party with the girls, getting to know each one. Sal wants to have sex with a sixteen-year-old black girl, but he does not after he sees her mother come to talk to her. Stan has a fifteen-year-old Mexican girl. Sal eventually goes with another girl, not his first choice, who wants thirty pesos (about three and a half dollars) for sex. Sal does not care and throws money at her. A big crowd has begun to gather outside the whorehouse to watch the Americanos dance and party with the whores.

An eighteen-year-old Venezuelan girl, drunk, latches onto Sal and gets him to buy her drinks. Sal desires her but does not have the heart to take advantage of her while she is drunk. He decides he wants to take her to a room, undress her, and then talk with her. His desire conflicts with the domestic instincts he has been feeling throughout Part Four. Sal keeps watching the black girl he had wanted earlier. He watches her sweep the floors and realizes how poor she is and how much she needs money. He contemplates just giving her money, but he thinks she might look at him with scorn and that he could not handle that. Sal thinks that he might be in love with the fifteen-year-old girl. Victor frantically shows the group that they have run up a tab of over three hundred pesos-thirty-six dollars. Sal convinces Dean that they need to bring the day to a close and get back on the road. They finally leave, dragging Stan out of the whorehouse, although he wants to stay and try out some of the girls of the night shift. They leave Gregoria to the celebratory goodbyes of the whores and the rest of the town.

Outside of Gregoria, Dean discovers that the lights on his car have stopped working. They decide to drive through the jungle in the dark. After a few miles, the lights finally come on, and the group revels in the new jungle climate and scenery they have entered. At a small jungle town, they pull the car over to sleep. Sal climbs on the roof and feels that he has become a part of the jungle, feeling the humidity and the bugs all over him. A sheriff comes by the car, but he only makes sure the group is sleeping. At dawn Sal witnesses a white horse emerge from the jungle, pass their car, and go back into the jungle. Dean thinks that Sal is just dreaming when he wakes, but then he remembers that he too had a dream of a white horse.

Back on the road, they stop for gas. Sal freaks out at the sight of all the jungle bugs gathering at his feet. Dean's and Sal's bodies are also soaked in the mixture of blood from dead bugs and their own blood, drawn by mosquitoes during the night.

They finally reach the mountains, where they observe the native Indians. They meet a small Indian child and talk to her for a while, trying to understand the differences between her and them. The Indian children attempt to sell them small crystals along the side of the highway, and Dean and Sal are confused and enamored with this exotic culture, so totally different and separated from the world of white America. Dean gives his pocket watch to one of the girls, and they are in awe of him. Sal compares him to a prophet who had come to save them. As they leave the children, Dean declares that his heart is broken to see them go. They continue traveling through the mountains, taking in the simple, primitive towns that go by. Sal muses that these towns are so cut off from the rest of the world that they do not even know that "a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday."

They enter Mexico City at dusk and take in the city. It is a place that seems to move and never stop, more than any other town they have ever seen. To Sal, Mexico City seems to be "one vast Bohemian camp." They spend all night just walking through the town, taking it all in, a "holy walk," as Sal describes it. Then, Sal gets sick. He has dysentery.

Sal spends the next few days in and out of a sick daze in bed. Dean tells him that he is going back to New York after getting a cheap divorce from Camille. Stan will stay in Mexico City and care for Sal while he is sick. When Sal breaks his fever and recovers, he immediately thinks about what a "rat" Dean is for leaving him sick in Mexico. But then he understands the complex life Dean leads, "his wives and woes."

Part Five begins by recounting Dean's journey home from Mexico. His car finally died in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and he wired money from Inez to get back to New York. After taking Inez to New Jersey and marrying her, Dean suddenly jumps on a bus for San Francisco to live with Camille and his two children. Dean now has been "three times married, twice divorced, and living with the second wife."

Sal returns to New York in the fall. There he meets the girl he had always wanted. They decide to move to San Francisco and to write Dean to tell him. Dean writes back with an eighteen-thousand-word letter. He tells them that he wants to come to New York to help them pick out a truck that will carry them and their "beat" furniture all the way to San Francisco. Dean shows up too early, though, and Sal has not been able to save enough money.

Dean has been reading Proust and has very many things to talk about, including the way they parted in a "fever" in Mexico. Dean wants to bring Inez back to San Francisco, where he is still living with Camille, but Inez wants to have nothing to do with him and throws him out. Dean gets a letter from Camille, wanting him to return. Sal realizes that Dean has settled with Camille and will spend his life with her. Sal thanks God for Dean's life.

Remi Boncoeur comes to New York and takes Sal and his girl, Laura, to the opera. Dean is preparing to leave New York for San Francisco and wants to ride in Remi's Cadillac to Fortieth Street. But Remi will not have it. The last time Sal sees Dean is as he walks down the street, receding in the back window of the Cadillac as Sal drives away. The book ends with Sal reminiscing about Dean as he sits on a river pier in New Jersey, thinking about the American landscape he had traveled across so many times.

Analysis

To Dean and Sal, Mexico seems to be the promised land that they were looking for on their many journeys. For Sal, Mexico represents the best way out of the conventional white American life. The beer and cigarettes are cheap, they can smoke huge amounts of dope, and they can visit whorehouses anytime they wish. All of this costs little money, and even more importantly, the police and the citizens of Mexico only watch, enthralled by the behavior, allowing it and encouraging it-perhaps because they are Americans. This culture has its own norms, and it is unclear why the travelers should be expected to worry about or even to know about conventional Mexican life.

Sal and Dean seem to have no knowledge of Mexican culture and instead see the land around them only in terms of their own situation. The people's poverty, instead of a hardship, seems to be complete freedom. Just as with African American culture, Kerouac's characters again invert the traditional understanding of the repression of racial marginalization and poverty, instead presenting the life of these Mexican people as being gloriously free from the pressures of work and money that are experienced in America. For them, the primitive nature of Mexico is its best feature. Unlike their American journeys, Sal and Dean see their trip to Mexico as a trip to the source of life. Mexican culture seems not to have been touched or corrupted by modernity. In Mexico, there is nothing to run from or to. It is only a culture to be embraced because it seems to stand outside of time and history.

The culture that Dean, Sal, and Stan experience in the mountains of Mexico stands outside of anything they have ever seen. Realizing that the road they are on is itself a modern construction just ten years old, however, Dean begins to understand that even wilder forms of life live beyond the highway. Yet, because they are still white American men, they may not be able to leave the highway to discover the Mexican subcultures. There remains a divide between what they want to experience and what they are able to experience. Sal despairs in his realization of what the road might mean for such seemingly pure cultures. He thinks about the invention of the atomic bomb, a symbol for the great destruction that modernity has brought, and despairs that one day the roads and bridges of culture will be destroyed along with the possibility of a pure and free existence.

Their experience in the Gregoria whorehouse provides Sal and Dean with one of their most amoral moments in the novel. During the day they consume massive amounts of alcohol and drugs, and the constraints of conventional society seem to no longer enter into their decisions at all. They have sex with young girls from different cultures and believe that this is what a pure culture can offer, the pure moment of experience. Only a brief moment or two of reality comes into Sal's mind when he sees the fifteen-year-old black girl. When she is sweeping the floor, he begins to understand her poverty and some of the realities of her life. Even so, there remains a divide between the two cultures that Sal cannot overcome.

Their arrival in Mexico City seems to be a revival of their previous experiences. Mexico City appears to be a "beat" city, and the reader can imagine the same kinds of activities and adventures that have characterized the rest of the novel. This final adventure might bring some closure and final understanding to Sal. Instead, Sal becomes sick with dysentery, Dean leaves, and the rest of the stay in Mexico receives no mention. In the beginning of Part Five, they are all back in America, having experienced the culture of Mexico but unable to stay.

The close of the novel finds Sal beginning to settle down with a new love and a new life. Remi Boncoeur's offer to take Sal out on the town in a Cadillac suggests the alternative of a respectable, conventional life. But as Dean shows up with no other intention but to see Sal, Sal wrestles with the feelings of being torn between the two worlds. In the end, Dean cannot enter the Cadillac to go to the opera, just as Sal can no longer follow Dean on the road. Sal has made his choice. As Sal and Dean recede out of one another's vision, one might recall Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, the postmodern "angel of history" as described by Walter Benjamin. This figure has great resonance with Sal's experience.

The novel ends with Sal contemplating the passage of time on a river in New Jersey. For Sal, no ultimate understanding of what "it" is has been accomplished. Sal finally understands that there is no such understanding except that of time moving by and people growing old and fading away. As for Dean, only his memory remains with Sal.

• Biography of Jack Kerouac
• About On the Road
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Glossary of Terms
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Part 1, Chapters 1-4
• Summary and Analysis of Part 1, Chapters 5-10
• Summary and Analysis of Part 1, Chapters 11-14
• Summary and Analysis of Part 2, Chapters 1-6
• Summary and Analysis of Part 2, Chapters 7-11
• Summary and Analysis of Part 3, Chapters 1-5
• Summary and Analysis of Part 3, Chapters 6-11
• Summary and Analysis of Part 4, Chapters 1-4
• Summary and Analysis of Part 4, Chapters 5-6, and Part 5
• Related Links on On the Road
• Suggested Essay Questions
• The Cultural and Social Influence of Kerouac
• Author of ClassicNote and Sources
• Purchase On the Road and Other Works
• Test Yourself! Quiz 1
• Test Yourself! Quiz 2
• Test Yourself! Quiz 3
• Test Yourself! Quiz 4
• Essays on On the Road
• Message Board on On the Road