On the Road, Post 2, Question 1

1.On the Road, while classified as fiction, is a loosely autobiographical account of the "Beatnik" writers' travels across America--narrated by Sal Paradise (AKA Kerouac).
What is your impression of Sal as a narrator? Reliable? Unreliable? Explain and cite the text for support.

Sal Paradise, aka Jack Kerouac, seems like a reliable narrator, but at the same time, his opinions can make him seem unreliable. In On the Road, Sal is so specific, it feels like the reading of a journal, such as on page 10, “I’d been pouring over maps of the United States in Pateson for months, even reading books about the pioneers and savoring names like Platte and Cimarron and so on, and on the roadmap was one long red line called Route 6 that led from the tip of Cape Cod clear to Ely, Nevada, and there dipped down to Los Angeles. I’ll just stay on6 all the way to Ely, I said to myself and confidently started. To get to 6 I had to go up Bear Mountain. Filled with dreams of what I’d do in Chicago, in Denver, and then finally in San Fran, I took the Seventh Avenue subway to the end of the line at 242^nd Street, and there took a trolley into Yonkers; in downtown Yonkers I transferred to an outgoing trolley and went to the city limits on the east bank of the Hudson River.” There is so much detail worked into the novel that the reader can clearly get a sense of Sal, and the way he thinks.

At the same time, On the Road is so overwhelmingly elaborate, there is an uneasy feeling that all the details must be some sort of smokescreen, trying to hide something. However, the reader is reminded that it is almost all true, as it is based on Jack Kerouac’s life, but the shadow of doubt remains.

While Sal’s account of his friends’ actions seems true, his interpretations of the actions seem, in general, inaccurate. For example, he admires Dean immensely, “…I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.”(4). However, Dean, for the most part, doesn’t seem to have many estimable qualities- “His specialty was stealing cars, gunning for girls coming out of high school in the afternoon, driving them out to the mountains, making them, and coming back to sleep in any respectable hotel bathtub in town.”(37) Throughout the book, Dean proves to be a reckless womanizer, cutting across the country while sleeping with multiple women, even while married, with children.

Sal’s opinion of Dean, and many of his other friends, makes it hard to completely rely on Sal as a narrator, not because his reports seem untrue, but because his views on the events do. In the novel, it can sometimes be hard to distinguish between opinion and fact.