The Central Friendship in Kerouac's On the Road

Introduction: A Revelatory Text

When it was first published in 1957, Jack Kerouac's On the Road was received like a revelation. Not only was Kerouac's writing style and approach to prose radically different from anything that had come before, but the novel also cast a light on a counterculture that had to that point persisted as largely unknown to mainstream America. Particularly through its intimate and humanizing portrayal of several key figures in the burgeoning counterculture movement, On the Road functions to bring the ideals, struggles, and cultural implications of this lifestyle to greater and more sympathetic awareness. The warm friendship between Sal and Dean serves as the center of the text, promoting a distinctly human subtext that readers from all socio-cultural backgrounds can identify with. This forms the basis of the book's remarkably universal power.

This power is a remarkable accomplishment given the inherently defiant nature of the text and the socio-cultural group it represents. According to a review of the text by Hassani (2005), "Kerouac presents Sal Paradise, a young and innocent writer, and Dean Moriarty, a crazy youth 'tremendously excited with life' racing around America, and testing the limits of the American Dream. Their journeys consist of scenes of rural wilderness, sleepy small towns, urban jungles, endless deserts — all linked by the road, the outlet of a generation's desire and inner need to get out, break its confinement, and find freedom, liberated from any higher belief, notion, or ideology." (p. 1) This description places the two protagonists in a state of seemingly endless drift, with little purpose beyond the pursuit of hedonistic impulses. This makes the relationship the two characters establish with one another a point of great importance — both as a stabilizing force within a sometimes dizzying, plotless series of misadventures, and as a source of comfort as they navigate the many unfamiliar corners of the American fabric.

Mobility, Identity, and the American Dream

This is demonstrated in Kerouac's own descriptions, which clearly channel the intense and inspiring friendship shared between the two men who truly lived as part of the Beat movement. This dimension of the relationship is remarked upon by Cunnell (2007), who confirms in a foreword to one printed edition of the Kerouac text that "On the Road does not appear out of the clear blue air. From Kerouac's writing journals we know that during his travels through America and Mexico from 1947 to 1950 he collected material for a road novel he first mentions by name in an entry dated August 23, 1948." (p. 3) We come to understand On the Road, then, as a log drawn from personal experience, imbued with all the recklessness and realism of the friendship around which it centers. To place his figures in a state of constant mobility against the backdrop of a changing America is to constantly challenge the characters' assumptions about their surroundings — and to challenge readers' assumptions in turn.

The article by Cresswell (1993) points the conversation in an interesting direction by theorizing that the theme of mobility driving the novel is both crucially important to identity within the counterculture and to the mainstream values carried by the American pioneering spirit. In other words, it may be that this focus on mobility is essential to making Kerouac's work on a fringe culture so universally relatable. According to Cresswell, there is an "apparent paradox of the ways in which mobility is used in Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road (1957). On the one hand the frantic directionless mobility of the central figures in On the Road represents a form of resistance to the 'establishment.' On the other hand mobility is clearly a central theme in mainstream North American culture, at least as important to the 'American Dream' as small-town values and apple pie." (Cresswell, p. 249)

Autobiographical Roots and Realism

In this way, the theme of mobility also directs us toward a more direct consideration of the friendship around which the novel revolves. In the relationship between Sal and Dean, we are given not just an autobiographical window into the lives of Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady respectively, but also into the core values to which the counterculture movement was essentially committed. This denotes the inherently relatable nature of Kerouac's otherwise bold content, with the friendship between Sal and Dean serving as a reflection of the community and family values that round out the parallels with "establishment" culture. These parallels make the text a particularly valuable meditation on America as it struggled between its cherished traditional values and the pressures of modernization.

Conclusion

This observation leads us to a resolution on the discussion. The reader is inclined to identify closely with the mores and ambitions of the characters at the novel's center. The relationship between Dean and Sal has become a conduit through which to engage more discursively on the challenges of cultural defiance and artistic ambition, showing that through their connection with one another and with their broader community, they gained the strength to choose to disconnect from the so-called establishment.