"On The Road" is whirling, buzzing and bursting with life. The writing style is stream of consciousness whereby Jack Kerouac lets loose with a typewriter committing what abstract thoughts he is having down into concrete words on a page.
The result is a fast paced and frantic joy. Sal and Dean often act impulsively chasing dreams, hopes and feelings across the country. Dean wakes up and feels an urge and Sal helps him chase it. I do not often look at literary criticism or specifically seek it but I am sure much is written about the closeness of Sal and Dean. Sal tells Dean's story with a vibrant passion so much so, one can't help feeling there is real and true love of the purest kind. Dean often settles in a place and forms some sort of "family" and then packs up and leaves the world around him in a flash, often harming people in the process. Sal has a greater sense of direction and purpose, while Dean is completely disjointed and frantic. The ending line of the book summarizes feelings and images so beautifully illustrated in the book -
"So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty."