What impression of Sal & Dean and the world they live in emerges in the opening of On the Road?

Sal has always dreamed of the West, where he has never been, and Dean, the personification of Sal's dream of the West, arrives and acts as a catalyst for the beginning of their journey ‘On the Road’. Sal is a strong believer of the traditional American Dream and Dean, Sal’s saviour, epitomises this. Sal believes that if he goes West, he will be able to make a living and find a wife as overall, he wants to find perfection. This constant search for perfection leads to Sal travelling back-and-forth across America, ultimately searching for something that no longer exists. He is paradoxically trying to find stability by moving.

In the first-person narrative, we can only see the world from Sal’s perspective: both his thoughts and his feelings. Sal thinks in verbose descriptive impressions and long, rambling sentences, like the way Sal and Dean and Carlo talk, and dense paragraphs. The sentences attain a breathless quality, skilfully embodying the excitement and the frenetic motion of the characters and events. However, the language is sometimes elegiac, suggesting Sal's nostalgia for a past that is irretrievably gone.

Sal describes his friends as thoroughly and truthfully as he can, and seems to also depict himself truthfully, sometimes self-deprecatingly. He is definitely the writer or the observer, often a little behind or at a distance, which is perhaps an attempt to see more clearly; when Dean and Carlo Marx meet, Sal falls behind them at once, watching them. Sal's appreciation of Dean's reckless impulsiveness and seeming ease is sharpened by his desire to have these qualities himself.

The opening section also introduces an important characterisation of Dean as a "holy con-man": the combination of veneration and truthful perception is a tone central to the entire novel. The idea of a ‘trickster hero-saint’ appears in many mythologies and in ‘On the Road’, this idea is humanised and complex, applying to both Dean and the events of the novel. Sal knows that eventually, Dean may disappoint and desert him, but he loves him anyway and goes along for the adventure, which will eventually drive them mad. Dean is both a saint and a con-man at once. It's a kind of faith Sal is describing, making reason and rationality irrelevant. Both their friendship and he novel is based on the idea that Sal and Dean ‘understood each other on other levels of madness’.

In the opening of ‘On the Road’, Jack Kerouac successfully gives the reader an insight into the frenetic lives of Sal, Dean and his stunningly beautiful girl, Marylou. With the novel following the form of their lives, the reader is fully immersed into their lives; especially their thoughts and feelings. Their journey across America starts here and they have no limitations as to where hey can go.