Sal's Motivation

hitchhiker “I walked by the jewelry store and had the sudden impulse to shoot up the window, take out the finest rings and bracelets, and run to give them to Lee Ann. Then we could flee to Nevada together. The time was coming for me to leave Frisco or I’d go crazy.” (Kerouac 67) The farther East Sal travels during the Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, the more we see that he is not simply moving around for fun, but due to complicated and dark psychological reasons. Like many of us, when it comes to travels, Sal is an extreme idealist. He romanticizes his trek across the country, which begins with his drive to see a bunch of areas that he has predetermined to be much better (more scenic, friendlier people, more homely, etc.) than they actually are. Every time Sal reaches one of his destinations, in this case San Francisco, he soon states that he needs to leave and move on to the next place. Although it may seem this way initially, Sal’s desire to constantly move himself from one area to the next comes not from his restlessness or curiosity to see the world, but from his fear of disproving his predetermined images of wherever he is at that moment. As soon as he begins to feel lonely in San Francisco (“…it was just the loneliness of San Francisco and the fact that I had a gun…” {67}, he decides that he needs to go. However, this can be interpreted as just an excuse for Sal to move on before he is able to realize that San Francisco is not all the he dreamt it up to be. By constantly changing his location, chasing after the postcard imagery that he has created in his mind, he avoids every feeling disappointed, for he never spends enough time in an area to strongly dislike it (except for, possibly, Denver, which he is heavily disappointed with.) Even after Sal reaches Los Angeles and sleeps with a pretty Mexican girl named Terry, the pair begins to plan on heading back to New York City, from which Sal was previously escaping. This just goes to help prove that Sal does not necessarily want to “see the world,” or even the country. He simply wants to be anywhere but where he is in that moment. Sal’s character is easily relatable for most readers, including myself, for we (perhaps instinctually) believe that a simple change of location or scenery will make our lives more exciting, help us “discover ourselves,” as the cliché goes, or even allow us to start anew. It is not until we get to these locations that we realize they are not all we imagined them to be—that WE are not all we imagined we would be whilst in these new locations. Yet, like Sal, we tend to make the same mistake over and over. We continue to move ourselves in order to avoid problems, even when it does not seem to be working.