Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

On Th e Road 143
motion.” Whether the cause is running, driving, accelerating the sense
of time, or falling into emotional and social complexities, the result
is a thrilling mixture of personal ecstasy and a perpetually promising
(because perpetually arriving) world.
Th at conception of a world in rapid motion can be generated in
another way as well, and Neal Cassady was an expert at it. Cassady
the driver was also Cassady the talker, and every reminiscence of him
registers the excitement of his endless monologues with their staccato
bursts of energy. Th e speed of his driving and of his refl exes was
matched by the speed of his talk so that the compulsive words could
be as infectious as the mountain rides without brakes. Tom Wolfe
metaphorically suggests the fusion of Cassady’s styles:
Cassady is a monologuist, only he doesn’t seem to care whether
anyone is listening or not. He just goes off on the monologue,
by himself if necessary, although anyone is welcome aboard.
He will answer all questions, although not exactly in that
order, because we can’t stop here, next rest area 40 miles,
you understand, spinning off memories, metaphors, literary,
Oriental, hip allusions. . . .
Th e various re-creations of these monologues indicate that they were
basically narratives of events and emotional entanglements, so rapid
and disgressive, so full of mishaps and mad scramblings, as to suggest
that Cassady in words was always trying to catch up with Cassady in
action, or as he put it in his autobiography, “my mind was thinking
such thoughts that soon I actually thought of how at last I could tell
you on paper perhaps the knowledge of action—But later.” Pointless
as they may have been, however, Cassady’s monologues did more than
set the world spinning in a listener’s head. Like the con man’s fast
talk, they promised something, too. Ken Kesey emphasizes this in his
tribute to Cassady: “Only through the actual speedshifting grind and
gasp and zoom of his high compression voice do you get the sense
of the urgent sermon that Neal was driving madcap into every roadblocked
head he came across.”
Neal Cassady was a confi dence man. He knew how to use his fast
talk for his own ulterior purposes, as in the trial run of the “Further”
bus when by prestidigitation and patient bewildering monologue he
convinced a suspicious policeman that a nonexistent handbrake was