Living In Extremes

In The Sun Also Rises and On The Road Jake Barnes and Sal Paradise both choose to leave the society that was originally their home, or as Erik Cohn puts it, their “center.” They embark on journeys because they feel alienated from their societies and believe they will find authenticity among the fellahin. Both Jake and Sal begin traveling to find these people who understand life and therefore truly live. Once they have located their respective fellahins they attempt to become intimate with the members so they can understand and live life the way these people do. However, to locate these people Jake and Sal have led quite abnormal lives, so they have not really found authenticity at all.

Erik Cohen explains, in his essay A Phenomenology of Tourist Experiences, that people travel because they feel alienated from their “centers.” If they were completely satisfied with their lives at home they would not want to travel. Cohen suggests that instead they build up “tension, created by the values” of their center and the monotony of daily life which can be relieved by taking a trip (181). In The Sun Also Rises Jake is alienated from the ridged post-WWI American values of conformity, materialism, and the traditional family. Because of his feelings of displacement he goes to live in Paris becoming an expatriate. At the point the reader is introduced to Jake he is already disillusioned with Paris. So, he travels to Spain in the hoping he will find people who really live and a new “center.” In On The Road Sal is alienated from New York City’s academic society and his life at Columbia University so he embarks on a series of road trips across America in search of people who live and in an effort to live fully himself.

When they leave their centers and go in search of alternate ones Jake and Sal are both looking for authenticity in the places they go, the people they meet, and the experiences they have. Jakes hates the tourists who, he claims, are invading Paris. When he and Bill Gorton go to Madame Lecomte’s restaurant Jake states with disgust, “it was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place” (82). When Madame Lecomte chides Jake for never visiting her establishment anymore he explains there are “too many compatriots” (82). He feels Paris has become just as fake as America and that to find authentic people he must leave. He goes to Spain to find the authenticity he misses in Paris. It is the negativity of the intellectual sphere in New York which disillusions Sal causing him to claim, “all my New York friends were in the negative, nightmare position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytical reasons” (8). He believes he can find authenticity he desires among the people he meets traveling across America.

In his essay Dean MacCannell discusses “the relationship of truth to intimacy” explaining that society often assumes when one is granted intimacy one gains access to what is ‘real’ (591). Through intimacy one can move from being an outsider who is only allowed in the “fronts” to a member accepted in the “back regions” By doing so one can see what is authentic rather than “mere performances” (592). Jake and Sal both believe in the relationship between truth and intimacy, therefore, both of them strive to find intimacy in order to succeed at their respective quests for authenticity. Jake discovers intimacy in the bull fights and his friendship with Montoya. Jake said about Montoya, “he always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the two of us” (136). Their talks about the bull fights create an intimacy between them which gives Jake access into the back regions of Montoya’s society. It is because Montoya sees Jake as an “aficionado” that he is accepted and it is this same aficion which makes Jake feel bull fighting and those who appreciate it are more ‘real.’ Jake is also able to obtain intimacy through the simplistic action of fishing. Because of this intimacy and the straightforwardness of fishing Jake feels it is another situation in which things are ‘true.’

Just as Jake obtains intimacy at the bull fights, Sal finds intimacy in the relationships he has on and off the road. He creates a certain intimacy with many of the homeless and wandering men he travels with on his way. On his first trip west he meets a fellow hitchhiker named Eddie and sticks with him because he “was like having an old friend along” (17). Sal acquires intimacy with Terry, a Mexican woman he meets on a bus. When she brings him back to her town they work hard and barley earn enough to survive. Sal works picking cotton among Mexicans, African Americans, and Okies. He claims that “[he] was a man of the earth, precisely as [he] had dreamed [he] would be” while he works the land (97).

Jake and Sal desire an intimacy with the fellahin because they think the fellahin have a stronger connection to the truth because they are grounded and live a simple life. As Sal puts it they do not have to worry about “white ambitions.” Since the fellahin hold such a connection to truth and authenticity Jake and Sal believe the way to reach the truth is to become close to or even a part of the fellahin. Jake’s fellahin are the natives of the Spanish villages he visits and the bull-fighters. As Jake says, “nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters” because bull-fighters live in the moment and with an authenticity that only a close proximity to death can obtain (18). Sal’s fellahin are all the people who live on the margins of American society: the poor, the hobos, the Mexicans, the African Americans, and especially the jazz singers. Outlining the life and authenticity he believes lies in the fellahin Sal says, “wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night” (179-180). Like Jake’s bull-fighters these people really live and have a closer relationship to death. However, their intimacy with death arises from the difficulty of survival rather than a conscious choice to live at the edge of death.

Jake and Sal believe if they live with the fellahin and enter their group then they will truly live. In doing this they could reach Erik Cohen’s experimental mode or even existential mode of tourism (189). They would have found new centers and be able to live in these new societies. However, neither Jake nor Sal ever commits to a new center. Instead they both experiment with the trying on others centers, like Cohen’s traveler who “engages authentic life, but refuses fully to commit himself to it” (189). Although neither of them returned back where they started they have also failed to join the center of any of the other groups they identified during their travels.

Both Jake and Sal leave home because they are alienated and desire to locate authenticity elsewhere. They believe the fellahin have a monopoly on authenticity and that the modern world cannot offer them anything least of all the true experiences they desire. In the end one cannot help but question how the authenticity of an experience can be measured. In the Sun Also Rises Jake and his friends travel around Europe striving to find authentic, real, and non-tourist experiences and places, but at a certain point one must stop questioning the authenticity of everything one encounters and the validity of one’s experience and just live. The characters in On The Road may come closer to reaching truth because they do just go as they search for the real people, making their quest seems much less scripted. However, they fall into the trap of over romanticizing the fellahin. Sal fails to consider that these people, who he so admires, may be free from the worries of white middle class America because they do not have the leisure. Instead, their focus is one of survival. The fact that they live such simple lives may give them a better chance at accessing truth, but one must not overlook that most of them do not choose to remain in this situation rather society subjugates them to that role.

In the search for authenticity and truth we must strive for a balance between the desire to just go like Jake and Sal and a need to tie things to reality. When Jake proposed to disillusioned Robert Cohn that he go see the bull-fights Cohn responded, “I’m not interested in bull-fighters. That’s an abnormal life” (18). Similarly, the lives Jake and Sal lived were actually abnormal, constantly traveling often without any sense of responsibility to anyone. So can they really claim to have been close to authenticity while living such inauthentic lives? In a desperate search for an authenticity that could make them feel they were really alive Jake and Sal lived in extremes. However, the only way to really find authenticity may be to stop living through others and do what they admired in the fellahin, just live their lives.