My favorite book this semester was not about Argentina

neal cassidy and kerouac aka sal paradise and dean moriarty

On The Road by Jack Kerouac is a book about two friends who travel many times over North America within a span of a few years. Their "beat" lifestyles lend them to easily encounter many interesting characters and situations. Though the book is considered a piece of fiction, many of the people and events in the book are based on real friend of Kerourac and himself. For instance, the very colorful secondary character Carlo Marx is in reality the indescribable Allen Ginsberg. Salvatore Paradise and Dean Moriarty crisscross between San Francisco, Denver, New York, much of the south and parts of Mexico in their adventures. In the book, Sal is always jumping around. He expresses at one point a kind of itch he has for traveling.He can’t stay around anywhere for too long.Though I am in no way comparing myself to Jack Kerouac. My mother seems to have contempt for my similar itch. “Why must you go somewhere every three months? When will it stop?” she asks. Clearly three months is not an actual interval, but just one she uses to further her complaint.Reading the book, I realized that in my short life I’ve actually traveled quite a bit. Though this is not said to brag, it is becoming clear to me that this traveling itch is somewhat rare. People become amazed at the places you’ve gone and places they will never go.Maybe this is what made the book a classic, was its ability to show an outcast interacting with a nation that did not share his lifestyle. This itch, which I’m sure we all have since we are in this class, says something about what we can find in ourselves and in our lifetimes that others will not see. Along with Kerouac and the beats, we seem unnatural, displaced, lacking roots. But the book showed me one thing about this kind of propensity to flee, is that there is never a sense that any kind of ending, sweet or other wise will show up. The road is always ahead always shifting and changing and much like life it won’t just settle.