Dean steals cars where the others are scarcely capable of filching a loaf of bread from an untended grocery. Fields saintliness,” is the only authentic proletarian in a basically timorous band of bourgeois rebels. Steady jobs and homes in the suburbs are for the “squares.”ĭean Moriarty, a real gone kid in whom Sal sees traces of a “W.
Then Sal’s pals are off again, by bus, on foot, by thumb, roaming the continent, feeling the wind of Wyoming nights and the heat of Texas days, looking for Moriarty’s never-to-be-found father or anyone’s sister, always expecting the ultimate in music or love or understanding around the next bend in the road. Their frantic reunions are curiously reminiscent of lodge and business conventions, with the same shouts of fellowship, hard drinking, furtive attempts at sexual dalliance-and, after a few days, the same boredom. Dean and Sal and their other buddies-Carlo Marx, the frenzied poet Ed Dunkel, an amiable cipher Remi Boncoeur, who has the second loudest laugh in San Francisco-are forever racing cross-country to meet one another. The book’s protagonist is Dean Moriarty (“a sideburned hero of the snowy West”), who has spent a third of his waking time in poolrooms, a third in jail, a third in public libraries, and is always shouting “Yes, yes, yes!” to every experience.
The story is set in the late 1940s, told in the first person by Sal Paradise, a budding writer given to ecstasies about America, hot jazz, the meaning of life, and marijuana. As TIME’s then explained, the plot was an opportunity for Kerouac to expound upon a new set of moral guidelines for young Americans:
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