On the Road: Part 2, Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Dean and Sal were looking for a place to live in Manhattan as New Year’s Eve rolled around. Ed talked about a previous New Year’s when he was broke and got free food from a bakery, and then mentioned how he got “visions all the time,” like a hallucination of his dead mother.

Sal asked Ed what he was going to do about Galatea, and what he was going to do in with his life in general. Ed replied, “I just go along. I dig life.” Sal, Ed, Dean, and Marylou drove into New York for a party.

Around this time, Sal got the feeling that he had forgotten something. He thought it had something to do with someone called the Shrouded Traveler. As he had once told Carlo, he had a dream about a “strange Arabian figure,” who pursued him across a desert. Sal was puzzled by the dream, but concluded that “something, someone, some spirit was pursuing all of us across the desert of life and was bound to catch us before we reached heaven.” Sal later thought this Shrouded Traveler was simply death.

Sal went to a party at his friend Tom Saybrook’s place and then stayed in New York for three days going to various parties. He brought Lucille to one and she told him she didn’t like him when he was around Dean. Marylou flirted with Sal and told him that Dean was going to go back to Camille, so he should come to San Francisco and live with her.

Sal resisted Marylou’s advances. He says that he knew he and Lucille “wouldn’t last much longer.” Lucille was married with a child, and Sal had thought that he could marry her if she divorced, but now he knew that “the whole thing was hopeless.”

Sal went to all sorts of parties. He saw his friend Damion, whom he calls “the hero of my New York gang, as Dean is the chief hero of the Western.” Ed went home with Lucille’s sister. Sal fell asleep on a couch with someone named Mona.

Sal went to Long Island and a party hosted by “the wild, ecstatic Rollo Greb.” Rollo lived at his aunt’s house, and she threatened to call the police when Sal and his friends made too much noise. Rollo had two libraries full of books, listened to opera, and was “a great scholar,” whose “excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light.” Dean loved Rollo.

During their weekend of partying, Sal and Dean went to hear a jazz pianist play. Dean was ecstatic at the music and referred to the pianist as God. Sal realized that Dean’s “madness would lead nowhere,” and says he “didn’t know what was happening to me.” He attributes this feeling to the “tea” he and Dean were smoking.