Saintly Visions or Blind Faith? (Part Three of Three)

Each of the other romantic heroes likewise fails to sustain and fulfill the spiritual promise which his narrator perceives in him. Ultimately, however, this failure is blamed not on the hero himself, but on his society. Faithful to the end, each narrator depicts his hero as a victim of external, worldly forces, which far exceed his own demonstrated capacity for corruption.

In his book, The Great Gatsby: The Limits of Wonder, Richard Lehan writes that Gatsby's death is blamed on "the careless people," specifically Daisy and Tom, who exist on a plane of "moral abandonment," reminiscent of T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" (33). In line 134 of this epic poem, faceless, paralyzed figures cry out despairingly, "Whatever shall we do?" (Baym, 1384). Similarly, the characters in Gatsby, excluding the romantic hero, have no sense of what to do with themselves, either physically or spiritually. Indeed, they have no sense of direction; this is what makes them such bad drivers, on a physical level, as well as bad people, devoid of conscience.

A lack of direction, or vision, can also be blamed for what happens to Dean at the end of Road. He gets abandoned on a New York street corner because of the spiritual short-sightedness of Remi Boncoeur, Sal's French-American friend. Like Louie Marsellus in The Professor's House, Remi is a figure of cosmopolitan worldliness, seemingly at odds with the all-American innocence embodied by Tom Outland and, of course, by Dean. Failing to see Dean as a saint - a holy fool - Remi instead dismisses him as just another of Sal's "idiot friends" (309).

If Dean, Gatsby, and Seymour are presented as victims, however, they are not seen as having suffered in vain. Rather, they are treated as martyrs by their respective narrators. At the end of each narrative, the hero's name is evoked and repeated, presumably as a means of keeping his vision alive, in the hope that it will one day bring enlightenment to the world.

For the time being, however - in the harsh light of reality - such vision may seem no more enlightening and beatific than that emerging from "the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg." It may, in fact, appear false, and those who champion it may seem guilty of blind faith. If this is the case, then "Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found" is not God, as Krupat indicates (Donaldson, 403). Instead, he is merely a bum: one of the many casualties of the "road," which does not point the way towards enlightenment. At least, this is what Amiri Baraka, and other critics of 20th century romanticism, would probably have us believe. Nonetheless, it can be expected that the appeal of romantic visionaries - the Deans, Gatsbys, and Seymours - will remain alive and potent so long as there are those, like the narrators, who accept realities, but who are always on the look-out for salvation from them.

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