On the road: carefree? They are absolutely and completely carefree, hissing and writhing in the vortex of their whims, every pang of a thought process reflected in miles. A laughing blue sky waiting to swallow you alive up there, an engine roaring merrily and burning hungrily ahead, the road and its devils grinning evilly below, Jack Kerouac's characters fly casually away along the twisted contours of their lives in his epic autobiographical On the Road. But what is the meaning of the book, with all its casual deviations: what is Kerouac trying to say without saying? To answer this question, the reader must examine passages in the book for rhetorical appeals. For example, in part one, chapter 11, page 63, when Paradise/Kerouac abandons the script to find a job, "a shadow of disappointment" crosses Remi Boncoeur's face; although no words are spoken at this point, the expression on poor Remi's face is more than enough to form a rhetorical appeal. The look conveys the feelings of the book's central characters that trivialities such as the day job should be put aside in favor of following one's dream (and clearly writing is one of Kerouac's driving passions). For one thing, this is an appeal to character; Remi, disheartened that Sal has turned his back on his dream, is someone who has no qualms about stealing couches, or food, or stripping a ghost ship of its valuables. In this way, his desire to live in the moment is linked to his questionable morals, a problem alleviated somewhat when his general goodness is illustrated by having him try to plan a night out to put his father at ease. When Remi wants something, he takes it, but overall he's a nice, big-hearted person, almost childish, to be honest. It should be noted that he has the amorality of a little boy. Therefore, this appeal to character should be seen as a cry to live one's dream - an almost naive way of thinking about things, seen from the childish eyes of Remi Boncoeur. Second, this passage contains an appeal to emotion. Remi's facial expression is meant to stimulate that part of Sal, and the reader, that would like to continually live in the present moment, chasing dreams and never giving in to the mundane for a moment. This is the message that the book mainly promotes: do what you want when you want and have as much fun as possible. Time and time again, the characters move through America's burning heartland, longing for liberation, for wonder. They live as slaves to today and the present. Of course there are exceptions, times when restless passions meet resistance. In Part I, Chapter 13, page 96, at the time he is living with Terry, there is a passage where Sal describes picking cotton, and he says "I thought I had found my life's work." He, Terry and his son live together, and Sal temporarily forgets his friends and his wanderlust. However brief this period may be, Sal becomes a "man of the land" and returns to the "simple life." Eventually, though, he tells Terry he has to leave and is on the road again. Two pages later he talks about the American landscape and how "every bump, rise, and stretch in it confounded my desire." Apparently, the wanderlust is back. Not long after, however, he settles down with his aunt for an extended period of time. He actually spends a year living a normal life, a strange exception to this Book of the Road. However, all it takes is for Dean to roar in a beat-up Hudson to send him full force back onto the road. For most of the rest of the novel, he and his company of.