LITERATURE: On The Road – Theme

Obviously the theme here is the road unraveling before them, offering directions, paths, choices, blah, blah, blah. And here is one of the damned few references to Sal Paradise’s purpose of taking this physical road trip:

I took up a conversation with a gorgeous country girl wearing a low-cut cotton blouse that displayed the beautiful sun-tan on her breast tops.  She was dull.  She spoke of evenings in the country making popcorn on the porch.  Once this would have gladdened my heart but because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.  "And what else do you do for fun?"  I tried to bring up boy friends and sex.  Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done–whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was.  "What do you want out of life?" I wanted to take her and wring it out of her.  She didn’t have the slightest idea what she wanted.  She mumbled of jobs, movies, going to her grandmother’s for the summer, wishing she could go to New York and visit the Roxy, what kind of outfit she would wear…

(…) "What does your brother do on a summer’s night?"  He rides around on his bicycle, he hangs out in front of the soda fountain.  "What is he aching to do?  What are we all aching to do?"  What do we want?"  She didn’t know.  She yawned.  She was sleepy.  It was too much.  Nobody could tell.  Nobody would ever tell.  It was all over.  She was eighteen and most lovely, and lost.  (p. 228)

Yeah, as opposed to our hero who rides back and forth cross country up and down, with stolen gas to fume somebody else’s doomed-to-destruction car, and welched food, and drunken days.  Now there’s a plan.

I’m just not getting the driving force (besides the madman Dean at 110 mph) behind even our main character.  I’m not convinced of his need to find something as much as his boredom and his wish to hitch his wagon for a while to the wild ride that Dean provides.

The only other strong influence I see within this book about a writer is his understanding of the story told by music.  This is where the prose becomes most realistic in impossible attempts to put it into words.  And even here, the feeling is a cliche: the middle-class white boy dream of being poor and black and possessing a soul.