Happiness In Jack Kerouac's On The Road

In the novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac, we follow Sal as he travels the country bouncing state to state and friend to friend following the crazy wild lifestyle of Dean Moriarty. Throughout the novel Sal and his friends indulge in sex, alcohol and drugs, and are constantly moving around contradicting the idea that in order to be happy you must find a job, a wife, have kids, and live in a nice home. During his journey we witness Sal and his gang of “mad men” counter societal norms by living life as they see fit to show that happiness is not the same for everyone and people do not have to stick to what society says is the “right” way in order to create our own happiness. In the novel Sal and his pals are constantly hopping from one girl to the next and those who do settle down seem to have lost their “madness”. Dean for example flip flops with Camille and Marylou the whole time while still flirting with a number of women on his journeys.
Sal himself finds countless women including Terry and Lucille who he has a chance to be happy with and start a family the way society tells us we should but he leaves them behind. On page 124 Sal says “I was willing to marry her” referring to Lucille but instead he decides to take off with Dean again and head West. With Terry, he seems genuinely happy and they tell one another that they love each other but in the end, Sal has to leave back for New York because he is broke and can’t support the two. Instead of finding work and fighting to be with Terry and her son Sal decides that it is not what he wants and leaves knowing he will never see her again. In this day and age, people are expected to marry, have kids and settle down in a nice home with a good job where the man works and the women take care of the children. Sal does not want to settle down and while he is tempted and given opportunities to, he finds his real happiness on the road hopping from place to place seeing and experiencing everything. Even though a majority of the time he is broke and hungry he still goes back to that life because for him it is better than the life everyone else is living. In the beginning on page 7 he states “the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles..” telling the reader that he enjoys the craziness and the madness and wants to surround himself with those people and while Terry and Lucille are great women whom he cares for they do not satisfy that need in him for the madness and would hold him back. People scoff at this, and his crowd, deciding they are a bunch of rowdy fools but they are intellectuals who fight against what people tell them they should be doing in order to do whatever it is they want to do, whatever it is that makes them happy. Society tells them to settle down and have children but they all move from girl to girl, especially Dean who marries and divorces multiple times. They want to love women for their beauty and their bodies but they do not want to commit themselves to one women the way they can’t sit still in one place for too long. In all his relationships we see Sal love and care deeply, even with his friends, but in the end he takes off and leaves everyone behind him including Dean eventually. The ones who do …show more content…
While he faces a lot of hardship and is constantly hungry Sal understands that his happiness does not lie within what society tells us it should be but instead in the world around us and everything is has to show us. Sal goes against cultural norms and lives the way he wants to live and not how other tell him to in order to find true happiness in the sad world around