On the Road or between the Pages: Seeking Life’s Answers

Abstract

Sal Paradise, Jack Kerouac’s alter ego, in his autobiographical novel, On the Road, wakes up in a cheap hotel room near the railway station in Des Moines, Iowa, and discovers as he looks at the cracks in the ceiling and hears footsteps in the room above him that for the first time he did not know who he was. He writes, “I wasn’t scared: I was just somebody else, some stranger … I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.” His answer to his identity question is to “stop moaning.” He picks up his bag, says goodbye to the hotel clerk, and goes to find some apple pie and ice cream for lunch.¹ While he travels, Sal periodically thinks about returning to college and wonders whether his children viewing family snapshots will think that “their parents had lived smooth, well ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives … never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our lives.”²

“I no longer knew what kind of person I was. I was someone who had prodigally squandered and lost the core of his soul on the road, trying to make Janan fall in love with him, to locate that realm, and to dispatch his rival. I did not ask him about this, O Angel, I asked him who you are.”

“I have never encountered the angel the book talks about,” he said to me. “It might be that you behold the angel at the moment of death, in the window of some bus.”

—The New Life