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

148
Jack Kerouac
in jail, a “change artist” of the fi rst order who could wish a parkinglot
customer Merry Christmas “so volubly a fi ve-spot in change for
twenty was never missed.” Like Gatsby and Augie March, however, he
can mingle with the criminal world and yet not become of it. Augie
manages this by detachment. Dean Moriarty and Gatsby actually
transfi gure criminality itself. Dean has a “native strange saintliness
to save him from the iron fate.” In his fi rst visit to Sal, Dean appears
diff erent from the down-putting, sometimes tedious intellectuals of
the East and diff erent from its criminals as well—“his ‘criminality’
was not something that sulked and sneered; it was a wild yea-saying
overburst of American joy.” By racing in society instead of putting it
down, Dean somehow redeems crime. As long as he can be a bringer
of faith and a celebrant of energy, he can without blame be the more
exploitive kind of con man as well.
Or at least he can in Sal’s eyes. Like so much American literature
of the nineteenth century, On the Road divides the world into believers
and doubters. Th ere are people like Carlo Marx (modeled on Allen
Ginsberg) who ask disturbing but fi nally wrong questions:
Th en Carlo asked Dean if he was honest and specifi cally if he
was being honest with him in the bottom of his soul.
“Why do you bring that up again?”
Carlo brings a demand for personal sincerity and for intellectual
point that runs counter to Dean’s whole mode of being. When he
asks the book’s central question—“Whither goest thou, America, in
thy shiny car in the night?”—Sal and Dean have nothing to say: “Th e
only thing to do was go.” Th e other skeptics in the book are more
practical in their demands. Th ey look to Dean’s outward behavior
instead of his beliefs and lose patience with him. “Con-man Dean
was antagonizing people away from him by degrees.” His former
friend Ed Wall “had lost faith in Dean.” His cousin tells him, “Now
look, Dean, I don’t believe you any more or anything you’re going to
try to tell me.” In San Francisco the old gang turns on him for his
irresponsibility, his carelessness, “his enormous series of sins,” and
when Sal tries to argue that “he’s got the secret that we’re all busting
to fi nd,” Roy Johnson replies that Dean is “just a very interesting
and even amusing con-man.” Even Sal has his days of doubt, losing