“A Knife at Myself”: Exploring the Theme of Conflict in Kerouac’s On the Road

“A Knife at Myself”: Exploring the Theme of Conflict in Kerouac’s On the Road

All great novels are based on conflict. Melville’s Captain Ahab wars against his own obsession. Steinbeck’s Tom Joad wars against his economic station. Hemmingway’s Santiago battles his bad luck in The Old Man and the Sea. In the Kerouac novel On the Road, the character of Sal Paradise faces his own conflict. He is at odds with the norms of the postwar society that demands he conform to the earn-spend-earn-die cycle of the working man. There must be something more. What does this all mean? What is the point? Is this all there is? Sal’s experiences on the road will help him answer these questions and help him find his place in the world. Sometimes you have to exit a thing, analyze it from the outside to truly appreciate what you have and what life can be.

            Sal describes his societal nemesis. Once he has returned to New York he is able to see with clarity, with “innocent road-eyes” what had caused him to leave. He describes Time Square, the symbolic hub of commercialized society, as a collective “madness” where the masses chase the almighty dollar. They are the “the mad dream-grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying, just so they could be buried in those awful cemetery cities beyond Long Island City (Kerouac, 98). Sal sees this pursuit as hopeless. The end result is the same whether one embraces the consumer culture or not; the cemetery. He has gained a fresh perspective after removing himself from the rat-race and returning again.

             Sal Paradise is conflicted in how he might respond to the machinations of society. He uses the juxtaposition of his New York intellectual friends against Dean’s perspective to point out the spectrum of options one has when they have decided the norms of conformist society is flawed. The “tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons” of Chad, Carlo Marx, and Bull Lee are pedestrian in Sal’s view. This is why the care-free Dean Moriarty appeals to him. He represents a heroic figure that doesn’t bother with seeking any real reform of society to affect change. Instead, Dean “raced in society, eager for bread and love” (7). As this is early in his journey, Sal has not yet decided his own response. He exhibits the apathy that results from knowing his friend’s intellectual reasoning and activism will produce no remedy. He is drawn towards the simplicity of Dean’s hedonistic mindset where he doesn’t bother with changing society at all. Dean takes from it what he can and only concerns himself with temporal gratifications. Sal must find his own way; the road is where he will discover who is right in the end; Dean or the intellectuals.

            Ultimately, an unfulfilled life breeds vulnerability. Sal realizes that what he is missing is love. Not the temporal, hedonistic, dalliances that has never produced happiness within his idolized Dean Moriarty. He laments Dean’s predicament, “So now he was three times married, twice divorced, and living with his second wife” (289). His hero has experienced plenty of sex; a term he confuses with love. Sal knows what is missing within Dean (and himself) is intimacy. His conflict is beginning to resolve itself in a fortuitous way when he meets Laura. They agree to “love each other madly” and Sal has gained a new appreciation for the stability of a home, an intimate relationship, and the promise of a middle-ground where he can operate within society towards fulfilment, not ineffectual hedonism. Sal must part with Dean and his ways. His epiphany came when Dean left him in Mexico City; “when I got better I realized what a rat he was” (288). The two must part as their goals are fundamentally different now. Sal has matured and Dean has remained Dean. Sal has Laura, a home and tickets to Duke Ellington. Dean was “ragged in a moth-eaten overcoat…eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again” (292). Their parting is sad but necessary. Sal’s conflict is resolved. It has taken him thousands of miles to realize his place within society and the path he must take to lead a truly fulfilled life.

Works Cited

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Viking, 1997. Print.