The Dangers Of Life In Sal Fitzgerald's On The Road

On the Road is a novel that expresses the thrill of taking that unknown path and the road not taken to see where it gets you in life. We sometimes get complacent with our lives and start to wonder what could have been if things had been done differently, and so we take two steps back to see if we can take three forward, but in cases, failure is inevitable and the receding steps don’t stop. That is why we try to change things and meet different people. We feel lost and anonymous in the big crowd and so we search for that special someone that makes us feel important and alive again. In other words, we look for someone who feels even more lost, because as human nature calls, we are always the most important person in our life, and so feeling better than the rest is always a priority.

In this particular case, the main character Sal Paradise is stuck in a life stage where he has reached his limit and his life has steadied off, making it repetitive and dull to him. Sal is married and has a writing career in front of him, but as he stops and ponders on what his life has come to he decided this is not what he wants and thus decides to throw it all away and start fresh. Sal has a problem because he becomes complacent with the life that people dream about. People grow up and do everything in order to finally settle down with the person they love and do what they love, but Sal resents his choice to let his life die down and wants to take action to give his youth another shot at the adventurous and rebellious life, and Dean Moriarity was the perfect person to make that happen.

When Sal met Dean it was like destiny punching him in the face. Sal saw this reckless, crazy, poor womanizer and saw the perfect opportunity to leave his old life behin...

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...how messed up Dean’s life really is, and even though Dean screws him over and leaves him to nearly die in a foreign country, Sal still sees him as his brother and he feels sympathy for him because he now gets the bigger picture of why he did everything he did. His ability to see Dean’s lost soul helps him feel better about himself and understand that his life was never the train wreck he thought it was.

In the end, Sal misses what he once had and puts an end to this crisis stage in his life because he feels more in contact with himself after seeing how destroyed Dean really was. Dean is missing someone to truly love, he is missing enjoyment of the little things in life, and he is missing the true and basic understanding of what it is to live life to the fullest. Sal doesn’t resent Dean for this at all though, and even sticks to the idea that Dean is his brother.