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Throughout the novel, Dean races from journey to journey and pulls other people along, including Sal Paradise. “With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road.” So to say, Dean Moriarty is the “blasting fuse” that tempts Sal Paradise to start his journey in America. Dean's various fixations include drugs, women, intellectualism and finally, his father and family life. In terms of his romance, Mary Lou is his first wife, a sexually voracious girl who accompanies him and Sal on their cross-country journey. However, he divorced with Mary Lou and married Camille later, mother of his two children and keep move in these two women and other girls he met during journeys. Eventually, Camille was driven beyond endurance and drove him away. Sal last sees him standing on a corner in New York City, alone but free, with eyes full of complicated emotions, and shares a brief but meaningful conversation with him before moving on.
Though behaves wildly and violates rules and regulations at will, Dean Moriarty has a commendable mind that is not easy to be detected by people who do not understand him. He is such a remarkable person with much shining point, which not just attracts people around him in the story like Sal and Carlo, but also affects so many people who are fond of this masterpiece of Jack Kerouac. Though there have been plentiful related researches made by excellent researchers all over the world, there is still a long way to dig out the real Dean Moriarty, who is regarded as the icon of the “Beat Generation”.
2.2 Dean Moriarty-- A cynical hero with “beat” lifestyle
2.2.1 Reinless lifestyle: A wild madman
As the protagonist of this splendid work about the “Beat Generation”, Dean Moriarty is a wild madman enjoys a reinless lifestyle, which may just the same as Beats people in America at the time of post-World War II. Those conspicuous elements included rebellion against traditional sense, addiction to drugs, indulgence in sexuality, yearning for Eastern religion, disdain for materialism, and chasing stimulation and happiness. He epitomizes “the Beat Generation” with all these distinct elements under Kerouac’s pen point.
When Sal’s aunt first met Dean, “She took one look at Dean and decided that he was a madman”. And the fact is absolutely true as what she thought. She concludes that he was not a good guy and warned Sal that he would get him in trouble. But Sal still loves hanging out with Dean and being with him. That is because Dean is exactly those kind of people who attract Sal the most: “…the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars…”, he is out of the ordinary, free from vulgarity.
In the eyes of Sal before he had met Dean, the latter is considered as a legend to some degree, though he was just known by his letters written to Sal’s friends and rumors. He is the record keeper of stealing cars in Denver and had been the reformatory for most of time during his boyhood. “In the West he’d spent a third of his time in the poolhall, a third in jail, and a third in the public library.” Living an unstable life, Dean Moriarty never follows the expectation of society, but acts absolutely crazy, always in seeking for sensuous comfort, no matter what the consequence would be. All of his madness embodied in several aspects of behavior. Dean loves driving at alarming speed for he enjoys the sense of high speed and excitement, yet that always makes others stunned. With excellent driving skills, he always handles emergency along the way easily, heads off dangers. Once he violated traffic regulations and was captured by a police, he refused to accept the fines. Similarly, he is so intractable that always turns a deaf ear to conventional people’s criticisms and refuses to mend his ways of handling matters.