One The Road - Post 2, Question 6

6. What other remarks might you have about the books? Questions? Observations? Reactions?

When I first started reading this, one of the first annotations I made was about the names of the characters Sal encounters on his way there. Many of them have a kind of Dickensian onomatopoetry about them, that I thought would reveal nuggets of insight about their personality. Although not all of them panned out exactly as I would have predicted based on the implications of their names, I felt that Kerouac first made an effort to make them seem as if they would.

"All my current friends were "intellectuals"-- Chad the Nietzchean anthropologist, Carlo Marx and his nutty surrealist low-voiced serious staring talk, Old Bull Lee and his critical anti-everything drawl-- or else they were slinking criminals like Elmer Hassel, with that hip sneer; Jane Lee the same, sprawled on the Oriental cover of her couch, sniffing at the New Yorker." (7).

It's literally impossible for Kerouac to have gone without noticing the resounding similarity between Carlo Marx and Karl Marx, particularly at a time less than a decade after the end of the WWII. Throughout the book you do come to recognize Carlo Marx as one of the big thinkers of the group, and because of his name, I kept expecting his ideologies to become controversial or contrasting with those of Sal. In a way, I guess they did, as he seemed to want Sal and Dean to settle down and organize themselves, something that wasn't really in their plans.

"Carlo was working as a typist [a writer? sounds familiar.] in an office. 'I want to know what all this sitting around the house all day is intended to mean. What all this talk is and what you propose to do. Dean, why did you leave Camille and pick up Marylou?' No answer--giggles. 'Marylou, why are you traveling around the country like this and what are your womanly intentions concerning the shroud?' Same answer. 'Ed Dunkel, why did you abandon your new wife in Tucson and what are you doing here sitting on your big fat ass? Where's your home? What's your job? Where's your home? What's your job?' Ed Dunkel bowed his head in genuine befuddlement. 'Sal--how comes it you've fallen on such sloppy days and what have you done with Lucille?' He adjusted his bathrobe and sat facing us all. 'The days of wrath are yet to come. The balloon won't sustain you much longer. And not only that, but it's an abstract balloon. You'll all go flying to the west coast and come staggering back in search of your stone." (129-130).

If Sal and Dean are embarking upon the Great American Journey and embody the fast paced, breathless free spirit that is the Beat generation, then surely Carlo's cynicism marks some sort of anti-Great American Journey tendency. In the same way the Karl's The Communist Manifesto predicted the surrender of capitalism to communism, Carlo was predicting an end that would have to come to their carefree lifestyle.