Sal Paradise As A Picaro Analysis

D. Sal Paradise as a Picaro-Would-Be
Salvatore Paradise is the narrator of the novel and the doppelganger of Jack Kerouac. Sal cannot be the same kind of Beatnic picaro with Dean since he can’t stand being lonely. As a picaro-to-be-hero, Sal needs Dean’s partnership in his transitional period because life seems meaningless without Dean: “Where Dean? Where everybody? Where life?” (Kerouac 97). Whereas Dean has no stable job or has nothing to do except travelling, Sal is becoming a writer and is determined to finish college. Sal accumulates experiences, stocks up feelings and emotions and put them into words as he returns to New York after each expedition to the heart of America. In the eyes of Sal, their life has become “the senseless nightmare

Mexico which is attributed as ‘The Promised Land’, ‘heaven’, or ‘utopia’ becomes Sal’s biggest disillusionment. As they are crossing the borders of the United States, they become real ‘outsiders.’ Now, they are in the territory which is not familiar to them. They aware that Mexico is the end of the road. Dean is no more a guide to the promised land on the grounds that he abondons Sal who has fever and gets into a serious dysentry. Sal does not surprise since he justifies that Dean is a con-man and this is an expected behavior from

In the novel, they are trying to experience this mystical situation through jazz, sex and drugs. In contrast with Dean and Carlo, Sal is not a user of drugs; however, he enjoys observing their behaviors and dialogues when they are under the effect of drugs. “To begin the world anew” is Beatnic picaro’s existential condition. This can be asserted that On the Road, examined as a picaresque narrative, ends at its beginning or begins its end when our picaro-to-be decided to narrate his life. Sal’s journey along the open road is a cycle from non-conformity to conformity, restlessness to acceptance.
As it is seen, Sal is a would-be picaro who can enact picaresque being through vicarious experience; he cannot be picaro and therefore there is an act of idealizing of Dean who is the true Beatnic picaro. In the final lines of the novel Sal sums up this feelings “I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty, the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” (Kerouac