I find this sentence significant because he compares the west to his future and the east to his past. It is as if the East is in his past and something he wants to move away and almost forget about. This is similar to the discussion in class that we had where we stated that Whitman describes travel as a way to move on and not have second thoughts about things that have or are currently happening. It seemed as if one should completely erase the problems of the past, and have nothing to worry about when moving on and traveling to start over. The narrator of On the Road makes similar points to Whitman where he has no thoughts of turning back and going back to his old life and is pretty content with the decision he has made of traveling and starting over even if it means being basically broke with no real plan. Traveling to the other side of the country is like starting a new life and making all of your troubles from your "past" or the East disappear.
Do you think that many people in today's society use traveling as a way to escape reality and get a break from what is actually happening in their lives?
I also feel that these few lines describe what is significant in the first three chapters. The narrator is a young man trying to figure out his life and get it started. He starts out in New York and wants to go West to his "future." He says all of this after waking up in a random hotel room where he is feeling a bit out of place and exhausted from all of the travel. Right before this statement about the "dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future," he compares his life to that of a ghost. My question would be why he makes this comparison and how it correlates to his travel.
ReplyDelete