Part 2 Blog Post on Madness

Probably the most famous quote from On The Road is, "the only ones for me are the mad ones, 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 and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'" (p. 6-7)

Throughout the book, this motif of madness comes up again and again, especially in relation to various people that Sal meets along the road, his friends, and the character of Dean Moriarty in particular. 

I'm going to list quotes from Part Two of the book that have this motif. 

"he suddenly had an explosive yen to see his sweet first wife Marylou again...He ran and found Marylou in a hotel. They had ten hours of wild lovemaking...Marylou was the only girl Dean really loved. He was sick with regret when he saw her face again, and, as of yore, he pleaded and begged at her knees for the joy of her being. She understood Dean; she stroked his hair; she knew he was mad." (p. 111-112)

"The madness of Dean had bloomed into a weird flower." (p. 112) 

"Dean was having his kicks; he put on a jazz record, grabbed Marylou, held her tight, and bounced against her with the beat of the music...The New Year's weekend began, and lasted three days and three nights. Great gangs got in the Hudson and swerved in the snowy New York streets from party to party. I brought Lucille and her sister to the biggest party. When Lucille saw me with Dean and Marylou her face darkened--she sensed the madness they put in me." (p. 125) 

"God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere. I didn't know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the tea we were smoking; Dean had bought some in New York. It made me think that everything was about to arrive--the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever." (p. 126)

After Dean tries to get Marylou and Sal to have sex while he watches so that he could know what she'd be like with another man... "Only a guy who's spent five years in jail can go to such maniacal helpless extremes; beseeching at the portals of the soft source, mad with a completely physical realization of the origins of life-bliss; blindly seeking to return the way he came." (p. 132)

"I expected [Dean] to take off on wings. I heard his mad laughter all over the boat--'Hee-hee-hee-hee-hee!'" (p. 141)

"There the mystic wraith of fog over the brown waters that night, together with dark driftwoods; and across the way New Orleans glowed orange-bright, with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly fogbound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops, till you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden and Panama. The ferry fires glowed in the night; the same Negroes plied the shovel and sang. Old Biog Slim Hazard had once worked on the Algiers ferry as a deckhand; this made me think of Mississippi Gene too; and as the river poured down from mid-America by starlight I knew, I knew like mad that everything I had ever known and would ever know was One." (p. 147)

Marylou: "'I'm sad about everything. Oh damn, I wish Dean wasn't so crazy now.'" (p. 163)

"Marylou was watching Dean as she had watched him clear across the county and back, out of the corner of her eye--with a sullen, sad air, as though she wanted to cut off his head and hide it in her closet, an envious and rueful love of him so amazingly himself, all raging and sniffy and crazy-wayed, a smile of tender dotage but also sinister envy that frightened me about her, a love she knew would never bear fruit because when she looked at his hangjawed bony face with its male self-containment and absentmindedness she knew he was too mad." (p. 163) 

Dean: "'Sinah sold encyclopedias in Oakland. Nobody could turn him down. He made long speeches, he jumped up and down, he laughed, he cried. One time we broke into an Okie house where everybody was getting ready to go to a funeral. Sinah got down on his knees and prayed for the deliverance of the deceased soul. All the Okies started crying. He sold a complete set of encyclopedias. He was the maddest guy in the world.'"

"Nobody knows where Slim Gaillard is...Now Dean Dean approached him, he approached his God; he thought Slim was God; he shuffled and bowed in front of him and asked him to join us...he'll join anybody but he won't guarantee to be there with you in spirit...I sat there with these two madmen. Nothing happened. To Slim Gaillard the whole world was just one big orooni." (p. 177) 

*Note, I don't follow the standard norms for quoting (punctuation marks after the quotation marks) because the quotes are appearing just by themselves, and not around other sentences, like they would be in an essay.