On the Road-Post #1

Outside of hearing about how there was an upcoming film adaptation, I had only vaguely heard of On the Road before sitting down to read it. One of the things that struck me the hardest was that most of the characters were unapologetically unlikeable. I don’t have a problem with that because it shouldn’t matter if a character’s likeable or not, as long as they’re interesting or well developed within the story, but it is unusual to read something where it doesn’t strive to get you to like and root for at least some of the characters.

Going off from this, one of the most interesting aspects to me is how Jack and Neal manage to vilify women throughout the story. They’re both users that leech off others’ hospitality and resources, and this especially accounts for how they treat women. Jack talks about marrying several women throughout the novel (including Beatrice and Pauline), but ultimately leaves them when he becomes interested in something else. He’ll have sex with them and wax poetic lovely phrases about how great their lives will be together but they never keep his attention for long. Their feelings about the relationship are never taken into account and Jack doesn’t particularly care about what happens to them after he leaves them. He doesn’t even treat his own mother right. It’s clear that Jack loves her, but he constantly takes advantage of her by asking for money. Jack is an adult and it’s unfair for him to assume his mother needs to keep providing for him and pay for his whims whenever he wants to travel across the country.

Neal is much worse in his treatment of women though. He, like Jack, also uses women as disposable sex objects, but takes it to a much higher level. Neal initially leaves Carolyn and his child to be with Louanne, has multiple affairs with other people but takes offense when Louanne does it, goes back to Carolyn, then leaves her again.  Neal has no regard for their feelings or financial statuses (Carolyn is stuck with their child to provide for and he leaves Louanne in several places where she’d have a difficult time trying to contact him). His relationship with Louanne is also exhausting in how many double standards takes place. Neal, along with Jack, is constantly referring to her as a “whore” because she has sex with men other than him. This is almost comical in its hypocrisy because Neal sleeps with plenty of people besides her when they’re married, he encouraged her to sleep with Jack, and if anyone is a “whore” in the story it’d be Neal who literally slept with men for money.

Despite this blatant misogyny, Jack in particular dreams of meeting a nice girl and settling down one day. They both even cheer on Jack’s mother when she talks about how the world could become more peaceful if men would ask women for forgiveness.  My favorite part of the story that I’ve gotten to is Helen brutally telling Neal off for his abandonment of Carolyn (it doesn’t matter that she asked him to leave; he still needed to go back, apologize, and be there for his child in some capacity).  It just textualizes a lot of the frustrations I have with Neal.