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Your Roots
Roots
When I travel alone, my identity is known only by myself. Everyone I come across sees my face and knows physically what I look like, but they can’t be sure of anything beyond that. There are so many opportunities to create stories about who I am because no one abroad can disprove me. They don’t know me. One aspect I never mess with is where I come from. I feel pressured to pledge allegiance to my home country, my home state, my home city. When I say “I’m from Austin, Texas” people can place me in a geographical place, and then force all the preconceptions and prejudices on me. This gives me the opportunity to prove them wrong.
Keroauc touches on the idea of identifying characters solely by where they come from. The scene in which Sal and Sledge are on duty and have to confront a group of rambunctious men describes the rowdy individuals as “the Alabaman” and “that Tex-as sonofabitch.” We learn nothing about these characters except where they’re from. Cresting a sense of distance, Keroauc extracts the two men from the actual setting and places them in their pasts. Keroauc ties them to their roots to emphasize the distance between Sal and the minor characters.
If Sal knows nothing else, he at least can understand part of their histories because he knows where they came from. Not wanting to give these characters much credit, Keroauc labels them in order for the reader to pick up on these characters loss of the majority of their identity except their home states.
Sal is always thinking back to New York as his home because he feels a sense of responsibility to return. People may not know who he is, but they can comprehend that he is from New York. That is something they can put their finger on and prove as a fact. He may travel clear across the United States, but he will allows have a yearning to return to his roots.
UpRooted
Yes, I definitely agree with your idea of rooting oneself to their home in search of identity. Coming to NYU, in fact, asking where you’re from was commonplace. And truly, learning where someone was from really helped me remember them, almost like a second name. Although I didn’t judge them based on that piece of information alone, I myself did take pride in the fact that I’m from Nowhere-town in Del-a-Where?! This sense of identity in place, especially for the traveler, becomes especially true when the “place” one refers to becomes the overarching idea of ethnicity. I think here, though, is where things get messy when dealing with stereotypes. Why though? Maybe to categorize a whole people is more ignorant because of the undermined true diversity in the population? Is a stereotype of one’s hometown more likely to be correct because it is more geographic and /or culturally specific?
Whatever the answer is, I think that we travel in hopes of breaking these stereotypes. We travel in hopes of opening our eyes and forming new opinions about the world. So it’s funny that Kerouac uses hometowns as a way to separate, and add more “distance” between the major and minor characters. Although it may have been an easy way out: just labeling them with a hometown and thereby giving them character in one word, it runs the risk of being no longer culturally relevant. And it’s not fair to use one’s hometown, a place where one was born to grow and give name to, as an only identity. Stereotypes change as the people change. And though it may take a while, I think travel and openness plays a major factor in that change.