The American Tramp

ed from reality. Kerouac plainly sees the tramp through the image established by the clown tramps: they are little men, hiding in the weeds and hopping on in the shadows, elflike, enchanted, dissolving in the darkness of the mournful Alleghanies. 6 They may, because of their half-starved, ascetic appearance, resemble saints, but the gods they serve are best left unnamed. It is important, I think, that none of Kerouac's heroes are tramps: despite his worshipful pose, Kerouac is a bohemian aristocrat, a Byron in blue jeans, and so are his heroes. Dean Moriarty, in On the Road, though son of a hobo-a raggedy father -is a con-man and a saint, but no tramp. Dean's chief characteristic (beyond his hysterical incoherence) is a restless excitement often associated with automobiles, which he drives madly across the United States: Suddenly I had a vision of Dean, a burning shuddering frightful Angel, palpitating toward me across the road, approaching like a cloud, with enormous speed, pursuing me 4 Bridge, in Collected Poems of Hart Crane, ed. with intro. by Waldo Frank (New York, 1946), p. 15. Cf. He was just a semi-respectable walking hobo ... who covered the entire Eastern Wilderness on foot. (On the Road [New York, 1957], p. 104). 5 The Role of the Undesirables, Harper's Magazine, CCV (December 1952), 79-84. See, however, the argument of Bernard De Voto in Year of Decision: 1846, Sentry Ed. (Boston, 1961), p. 506: The notion that the free lands on the frontier served as a 'cushion' to our cyclical depressions is textbook economics. Only a small fraction of the dispossessed even 'went west' at any time-they simply could not afford to-and the fraction grew smaller as the frontier got farther from the industrial districts. 6 Kerouac, Dharma Bums (New York, 1958), p. 6; On the Road, p. 105. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.112 on Mon, 03 Oct 2016 05:38:12 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 538 American Quarterly like the Shrouded Traveler on the plain, bearing down on me. I saw his huge face over the plains with the mad, bony purpose and the gleaming eyes; I saw his wings; I saw his old jalopy chariot with thousands of sparking flames shooting out from it; I saw the path it burned over the road; it even made its own road and went over the corn, through cities, destroying bridges, drying rivers. It came like wrath to the West. 7 Without being an actual tramp, Dean has the tramping urge, the wandermadness, crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer, and only because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars, generally the Western

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