Death is Bliss: On the Road, a Freudian reading

In Jack Kerouac’s novel, On the Road, the narrator Sal shows symptoms of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. In the middle of his journey to Western America, Sal wakes up in a motel and says, “I didn’t know who I was – I was far away from home, haunted and tired with travel…I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost” (Kerouac 15). Sal reaches his desired destination to California. To his dismay, “the end of America,” does not fulfill his expectations of the West. Thus, he ironically journeys back to where he began: New York. While in New York, Sal is overcome by a familiar feeling of disorientation. He says, “Just about then a strange thing began to haunt me. It was this: I had forgotten something. There was a decision that I was about to make before Dean showed up, and now it was driven clear out of my mind but still hung on the tip of my mind’s tongue” (Kerouac 124). In the motel, Sal becomes forgetful of important matters. In Freud’s essay, The Interpretation of Dreams he offers an explanation for similar behavior. He says, “Forgetting is very often determined by an unconscious purpose and that it always enables one to deduce the secret intentions of the person who forgets” (Freud, 397). Perhaps Sal’s forgetfulness is representative of something that he is not fully aware of. Sal continues, “I couldn’t even tell if it was a real decision or just a thought I had forgotten. It haunted and flabbergasted me, made me sad” (Kerouac 124). Sal has an intense array of emotions caused by something he cannot remember. It is his unconscious that is causing the familiar, yet unidentifiable feelings. Sal searches his memory for the decision he must make. He reveals, “It had to do somewhat with the Shrouded Traveler: a dream I had about a strange Arabian figure that was pursuing me across the desert; that I tried to avoid; that finally overtook me just before I reached the Protective City” (Kerouac 124). It is strange that Sal looks to his dream, filled with the unfamiliar, in order to understand what he consciously cannot remember. Freud would describe Sal’s dream as “the uncanny,” or, when “one does not know where one is” and what is “frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar” (Freud 418). Sal concludes, “The one thing we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death” (Kerouac 124). In a cyclical repetition, Sal undergoes mental instability caused by his unconscious. Sal conforms to Freud’s concept of the phallic stage in childhood: “A little boy will exhibit a special interest in his father; he would like to grow like him and be like him, and take his place everywhere” (Freud 438). Because Sal's father is no longer living, it is no wonder that Sal’s journey around America is unfulfilling and unsettling. Sal’s bliss can only be found where his father is: “in death.”

Works Cited

Freud, Sigmund. "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 438-440. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 397-414. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Ed. Julie Rivkin & Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2004. 418-430. Print.

Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. New York: Penguin Books, 1976. Print.