On the Road-Post 1

What is your impression of Sal as a narrator? Reliable? Unreliable? Explain and cite the text for support.

Paradise is a reliable narrator in the sense that he knows the story and is a constant presence in it. We understand that he is too involved in it to sift out details, he loves it too much. But I think that he is most of all a passionate narrator. There is nothing else he would rather be doing than telling us this story (this is proven in the creation of The Original Scroll), there is nothing more important to him, including living this story without recording it. This means that he’s going to be excited, and as the reader you have to understand his excitement, or at least be willing to take the detours he is guaranteed to lead you down, because he knows that you need to follow this exact route with him in order to understand the ideal that I think is the core of the book.

I think On the Road is the result of Paradise and Moriarty (and other characters who are picked up and left on this road) going out to find and experience this ideal that they have in mind, this life on the road with as complete a freedom as they could attain. Moriarty is like the story’s ideal-detector, who begins to ramble and act up whenever this ideal is within reach. I’ve also found that when Kerouac uses “we” more often, it’s while they’re experiencing their ideal (see ps. 235, 242, 254, etc.)

Another result of a passionate narrator is that there might not be designated summarizing, reflective passages where you can be filled in on exactly how the character(s) might have changed, or the whys of the situation, because Kerouac expects that as the reader becomes more familiar with his ideal, he/she will be willing to not necessarily look for the significance in what’s being said, but finding significance in how it measures up to the continuously-evolving ideal. This is true in these quotes: “ ‘... And then we’ll go off to sweet life ‘cause now is the time and WE ALL KNOW TIME!’ ” (p. 216, Moriarty’s short monologue) Here I was a little confused, because I thought I was meant to understood that Moriarty didn’t necessarily believe in time, but after taking it in context of the other ideas he was laying out in the same monologue, and almost translating it into what I thought Moriarty wanted out of this moment (after getting acquainted with his character for the whole book up to this point), regardless of what he was actually arguing for, this thought more readily paralleled the ideal.