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

On Th e Road 147
the middle of the chorus he gets it—everybody looks up and
knows; they listen; he picks it up and carries. Time stops . . .
everybody knows it’s not the tune that counts but IT.
Dean, in Sal’s re-creation, is a visionary and an enthusiast. When
he races compulsively about the city in the night, digging the streets,
digging the jazz players, digging the intellectuals and the criminals,
we are to believe that he is restlessly seeking IT in its many passing
manifestations. Th e world pouring past the car window is merely
the rush of appearances, and to perceive them in a rush is to come
closer to what is beyond them. Th us as Dean and Sal race through
experience they are doing a kind of high-voltage meditation, “our
fi nal excited joy in talking and living to the blank tranced end of all
innumerable riotous angelic particulars that had been lurking in our
souls all our lives.”
It is this enabling faith that transfi gures the outward gestures
and style of Dean Moriarty. What could easily appear to others as
restlessness, undependability, a mere compulsion at every moment
to GO, turns out to have a metaphysical basis as Sal interprets it:
“we all realized we were leaving confusion and nonsense behind and
performing our one and noble function of the time, move.” Th e world
of particulars and appearances is a world of hassles and misleading
entanglements, and much as Dean delights in complication, he leaves
it behind on the road, rising above it, cruising past it, seeing beyond it,
restoring his sense of control and order and personal authority. Th is is
the inward content of Dean’s obsession with speed, the promise behind
his fast talk. He does not try to make people believe precisely what he
says; they usually recognize that he is “making logics where there was
nothing but inestimable sorrrowful sweats.” Instead, he off ers them
a ride, no destination, you understand, but fl eeting glimpses of IT
through the rush of visions. “Th ere’s always more, a little further—it
never ends.” Th is is the sense in which Dean the con man has and
shares “the tremendous energy of a new kind of American saint.” And
the American traditions, both popular and intellectual, that celebrated
such bearers of faith and energy were precisely what gave Kerouac the
perceptual framework to look beyond Neal Cassady and see Dean
Moriarty and to look beyond both and see . . . IT.
Yet Dean Moriarty is, of course, a criminal. He is that kind of
con man, too, a compulsive thief of cars who spent much of his youth