they sometimes happen to receive that "bread and love" along the way. Adventures such as Dean’s continually failed relationships with women are clear examples of this lust for life turning into despair. Life with his first wife MaryLou becomes awful for Dean when she whores herself about town, Camille lives with Dean during a period when his life is "not so good," and Dean simply leaves his final wife Inez to return to San Francisco to live with Camille once again. Carole Vopat reiterates the sadness and complete lack of positivity of this pattern, noting that instead of "finding life" they are actually leaving it all behind "and especially in the best American tradition, they are leaving behind responsibility; wives, children, mistresses, all end up strewn about the highway like broken glass" (Vopat, 387). While to Sal, Dean may be the person whom primarily exemplifies the hopefulness and love for life that should guide this novel, he is more correctly seen as a negative and ultimately horrible character who in truth exemplifies what is wrong with the culture at the time, leaving women and family behind "like broken glass."It is not only the adventures that Dean embarks upon that often veer from his initial optimism, but it is also his life in general that follows the cycle of excited exuberance to a gloomy reality. While early on in the novel Sal describes Dean as an ultimate figure of manhood and the "western kinsman of the sun" (Kerouac, 7), by Part Three Dean’s life of disappointed optimism and uncontrolled impulsive nature has led him towards many problems. As described in Tim Hunt’s book Kerouac’s Crooked Road, Dean is a "fool for his refusal to recognize more clearly the way his allegiance to impulse and energy is gradually damning him" (Hunt, 70). Hunt does not see Dean as the optimistic catalyst that Sal does, but as an exemplification of what this story is really about – about hopes that a...
