Monday, August 22, 2011

On The Road (Question 1, Post 5)

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

I think Kerouac's accounts of life on the road through Sal are fairly reliable. The book is obviously very descriptive. I would think it would be difficult to create so many lies of what I see as quite believable stories and events. Sure, some things in the book sound a little beyond belief to us (such as hitch-hiking), but let's remember that this story takes place in the early 1940s. Times were a lot different then than they are now. People back then weren't afraid to pick up a helpless man on the side of the road.

On the other hand, I'm going to be honest and say that most of the dialogue in the novel was probably created by Kerouac and not necessarily what the real characters said at all.
I just flipped to a random page of the book, and here's a quote from Terry: "Six-foot redhead, hey? And I thought you was a nice college boy, I saw you in your lovely sweater and I said to myself, Hmm, ain't he nice? No! And no! And no! You have to be a goddam pimp like all of them!". Thinking again, it makes the novel seem a lot less reliable when you take the fact that all of the dialogue was made up into consideration. However, I trust kerouac's accounts and I highly doubt he deliberately created entire events for the purpose of spicing up the book.
Posted by Andrew at 12:13 PM

3 comments:

Esther said...

I agree about the basic plot and series of events being reliable and the dialogue less so. However I also definitely don't think Kerouac was reliable enough to omit his personal biases towards certain types of people or lifestyles. One instant where this is obvious is at a bar in LA. Sal says,"we saw a horrible sight in the bar; a white hipster fairy had come in wearing a Hawaiian shirt and was asking the big drummer if he could sit in. The musicians looked at him suspiciously. "Do you blow?" He said he did, mincing. They looked at one another and said "Yeah, yeah, that's what the man does, shh-ee-it!""This is a pretty judgmental passage. Its not that the character of Sal should have no controversial opinions. Its just that if you stick to the idea that the dialogue is mostly made up, Kerouac has succeeded in impregnating the entire scene and characters in the the scene--besides just Sal--with his own opinion. Which is OK too. I'm just not sure I'd define it as strictly "reliable."

August 22, 2011 at 1:41 PM
Lily said...

I agree with the opinion that Sal's narration is very subjective. The audience never has the chance to hear another voice, which is interesting because it completely immerses the reader in his own thoughts. We can of course induce our own judgments from what we might consider moral (ie. the horrendous treatment of women at the time), but how can we say that Marylou wasn't actually a bimbo of sorts until Part III, when Sal describes a more emotional side of her?

Also, in terms of 'making up dialogue,' I feel that Kerouac purposefully made it seem as if Sal filled in the blanks for his only-human memory. This is probably why some of the characters appear to be ridiculously confused.

August 22, 2011 at 4:40 PM
Michelleyy said...

I agree with lily when she said that the author made it look like the characters were just talking nonsense and they seemed confus, im not going to lie but this book to me was very confusing, I had to read the page over and over again to actually understand it

August 22, 2011 at 7:47 PM

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Blog Archive