On the Road

“I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won’t bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead.”

This quotation supplies an early point of contrast between Sal’s dull existence before he meets Dean and his exciting life after a friend introduces them to one another. Before meeting Dean, Sal was a regular person whose life involved romantic breakups, illness, and not much else. Afterward, Sal’s life becomes a constant stream of excitement and chaos, all thanks to Dean Moriarty.

“It was the spirit of the West sitting right next to me.”

Sal’s conception of the West is synonymous with his conception of Dean. To Sal, Dean and the West both represent a form of uninhibited freedom that is juxtaposed against the mundane, dull, and predictable world of the East. Sal is a traveler through the American West, while Dean is the embodiment, meaning that Sal is simply a biographer who documents Dean’s freewheeling energy and the regions they explore. Sal may be physically present in the West, but he never lives it the way Dean does.

“Dean, who had the tremendous energy of a new kind of American saint, and Carlo were the Underground monsters of that season in Denver.”

Sal views Dean with an almost religious fervor. He compares Dean to a saint, a spiritual embodiment of everything that the American zeitgeist has to offer. Dean Moriarty’s energy excites Sal like nothing else, converting him into a believer in the importance of freedom. Nevertheless, he also compares Dean and Carlo to underground monsters.