I keep waiting for something to grab me in my reading, but seem instead to be just bopping along the road with Kerouac’s Sal Paradise. The truck ride was fun, and I saw some depth developing to the characters:
Meanwhile the blond young fugitive sat the same way; every now and then Gene leaned out of his Buddhistic trance over the rushing dark plains and said something tenderly in the boy’s ear. The boy nodded. Gene was taking care of him, of his moods and his fears. I wondered where the hell they would go and what they would do. They had no cigarettes. I squandered my pack on them, I loved them so. They were grateful and gracious. They never asked, I kept offering. Montana Slim had his own but never passed the pack. (p. 32)
It’s a very simple, journalistic style of story and yet choice of words is what makes it warm. "Gene was taking care of him, of his moods and his fears." No wasted words here, yet we’re made aware of a special fatherly relationship an experienced hitchhiker has with a young, scared runaway boy. There is the narrator’s awareness of it and it reaches into him, "I loved them so." Of course Sal is quite drunk, as are they all on a good part of this ride on a flatbed. But where you might have expected Kerouac to describe the scenery from New York to Denver, we see the character changing instead of the landscape.
Simply done, and something the reader is not bombarded with but gets into and rolls along with the story without realizing fully how gradually he is becoming involved.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology