Question 7. Post 6.

If every book is an author's attempt to answer one of life's questions, what question is McCarthy and/or Kerouac attempting to answer? Explain.

Both books are about satisfying needs, finding truth, and making the best life possible for yourself. Kerouac is testing if there is such a thing as fulfillment, and McCarthy wonders what we are and what purpose is (particularly the purpose of life.) Kerouac does everything he can to satisfy needs that might go overlooked if you pay attention to structure and destinations--- wherever he thinks he can find happiness, he goes. Mexico, a friend in San Francisco, Italy, back home, in a hitchhiker, in drugs, in his friends girlfriend, in religion. Each place he goes, in everything he does, he reflects on his happiness (him and Dean that is, with Dean being the in-scene narrator). The writing itself, its pace and the juxtaposition and wordmashing and punctuation and the amount of contradictions, all suggest how the present scene is measuring up. Either way, it’s back on the road after--- and it becomes obvious that if he does find fulfillment, you’re not sure whether he’ll bask in it or not, because he so inhabits the present with all of its constant changes. McCarthy strips the world of almost everything except a man and a boy and sets the scene so that it seems there is only ever meaning in death. His question about purpose is obvious in that the two of them continue to reject suicide, even death of their presence mind (which they think will vanish if they eat another person to survive.) They find purpose in sacrificing themselves for the other. To make his final point, in the last chunk of the story, McCarthy even has the boy re-hash and question everything up to this moment, when the man who offers him another chance at life can’t understand the words the boy has lived by this whole time, such as “carrying the fire.” Books are usually written for the readers, and so accessibility is usually a pretty big deal, but with McCarthy, all the usual elements of the story are sacrificed for bigger ideas, like purpose. The characters are close to embryonic, and are lost in McCarthy’s desire to fold huge concepts into their every action, even going so far as to make them lose themselves in each other (signifying their finding purpose in the other) by intentionally losing their already foggy identities in vague pronouns, so that “he” can really be either one of them, and so even the actions of characters and the brittle action-skeleton of the story itself is open to interpretation. Between the two books, both aspects of satisfaction and fulfillment are covered, with On the Road satisfying the id and The Road satisfying the superego. Or maybe it’s ego, what do you think?