p. 106 "Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. I stumbled haggardly out of the station; I had no more control. All I could see of the morning was a whiteness like the whiteness of the tomb. I was starving to death."
This quote reminds me of something Sal said at the beginning of the book, "...and my feeling that everything was dead" and how he was a "ghost in his own house." His journey to the east and back left him starving, and this leads me to believe his journey was unfulfilled in some way, that Sal hadn't been handed the pearl he alluded to earlier in the book.
Question: Do you think the Ghost of the Susquehanna is a foreshadowing of Sal's future?
I couldn't figure out how to post on here again. For some reason, it won't allow me to click on "Create Post." So here is my significant quote from chapters 11-14.
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"My stay in San Francisco was coming to an end...How disastrous all this was compared to what I'd written him [Remi] from Paterson, planning my red line Route 6 across America. Here I was at the end of the America - no more land - and now there was nowhere to go but back. I determined at least to make my trip a circular one; i decided then and there to go to Hollywood and back through Texas to see my bayou gang; then the rest be damned."
I found this quote to be significant because I think it resorts back to what we talked about on the first day of class. A road trip isn't going to follow every little plan you had for it. In fact, you are going to follow whatever path it takes you on. When Sal talks about the road trip being a "circular" one, and that he "had nowhere to go but back", to me that illustrates the fact that a road trip is so mysterious in its definition.
My question is: Do you think Sal would do the whole "road trip" thing over again after everything he's experienced in this first part of the book?
Wes, I think this quote really sums it all up. He is not satisfied with what has happened along the way and the fact that his trip has come to an end. This is true for all of us I think; at the end of an awesome trip you do not want it to end and you recall everything that happened. You laugh at at the things that went wrong and realize that they are in the past and there is nothing you can do to change it. Also, every roadtrip is a "circular" one in that you eventually have to come home. It seems as Sal did not realize this when he says "here I was at the end of America - no more land - and now there was nowhere to go but back."
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