One of Dean's trademark qualities is his tendency to sweat. All the time.
"'Whoo!' said Dean. He was rubbing his chest, his belly; the sweat splashed from his face." (198).
"He [Dean] trailed her [Marylou] around town. He wanted absolute proof that she was a whore. He loved her; he sweated over her." (184).
"Dean was sweating around. It was the end; I wanted to get out." (178).
"Dean stands in the back, saying, "God! Yes!" -- and clasping his hands in prayer and sweating." (177).
And these examples are all within twenty pages of each other. From what I can tell he sweats when he's happy, when he's stoned, when he's angry, when he's tired, and probably everything in between. I think sweat universally makes people uncomfortable, at least the deodorant companies hope so. For me, Dean's sweating habits made him just a little less likable. Considering how unpopular he is with pretty much everyone else besides Sal, I think Kerouac's constant reminder of that physical unappeal was just a way to make him a little harder to like. It's also proof of how all inclusive Kerouac was in his prose. He didn't leave out a single hairy, slightly repulsive detail.
Another example of a description that repeated itself was Kerouac's use of the color red.
"In a sad red dusk we were finally seated in the car and Jane, Dodie, little boy Ray, Bull, Ed and Galatea stood around in the high grass, smiling. It was good-by." (155).
"When the sun came out red through the clouds of my last valley afternoon, Terry led me to Farmer Heffelfinger's barn." (99)
[after he leaves Remi Boncoeur's] "The sun goes down long and red...the sun the color of pressed grapes slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries." (80).
"Her face [Jane Lee], once plump and Germanic and pretty, had become stony and red and gaunt." (142).
Every time the reader hears about something red, whatever's going on in the story is coming to a close, or at the end of its rope. He's either leaving the Lee's, the Boncoeur's, Terry, or it's just the end of long day (as far as I could tell, only sunsets were described as red). Interestingly, after having established this pattern, Kerouac uses red to describe the aged and worn look of Jane Lee's face, subliminally communicating that she's getting over the hill herself. Unrelatedly, I also just love the way Kerouac repeated the 'blank and blank and blank' set up in that excerpt. It gave the writing a kind of poetic cadence that stuck with me when I thought of Jane later.
2 comments:
I agree, the constant mentioning of sweat enforced my view of Dean of a greasy, slippery pig. It reflects what he does, such as being in two relationships at once. Self-centered. Only interested in himself.
For some reason, whenever I imagined Dean, I thought of the Dean from the show Weeds. They're quite similar, actually...
haha @Andrew that's true, and Weeds is a fun show.
But i had never noticed the sweat thing, now that i think about it, he was sweating often, and Sal was always making note of it. I love your theory that it was to make him harder to like, it makes alot of sense to me. Because if noone else likes him, it sort of strengthens the admiration Sal has for him, in a way I can't really explain yet.
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