In exploring Kerouac's need for socially-defining terms of his lifestyle, the importance placed on his family sheds a new light on the struggle to represent oneself and one's group through language. During the narrator's visit at home in North Carolina for Christmas, tension between him and his brother-in-law finally reaches a breaking point in an argument over the dog:
...my serenity was finally disturbed by a curious argument with my brother-in-law; he began to resent my unshackling Bob the dog and taking him in the woods with me. "I’ve got too much money invested in that dog to untie him from his chain." I said "How would you like to be tied to a chain and cry all day like the dog?"He replied "It doesn’t bother me." (143)
The tension between Ray Smith and his brother-in-law lies deeply in their societal values, not in their specific concerns for Bob. The brother-in-law's values are placed in tradition and economics. He cannot stand the idea of a dog being able to run free because it is normal--traditional, even--to keep him chained up. Also, he views the dog as property, "I've got too much money invested in that dog.."--his property, while Ray views the dog rather as a sentient being who should be valued and respected on a more humane level. This dog, like any human, is alive, and should be treated with the same respect and mutuality, according to Ray. Ray also views all humans tied into the system of economic concerns and consumerism to be chained and controlled like Bob. A few pages before this passage, Ray announces, “I felt free and therefore I was free” expressing his liberation from the bonds of consumerism (138). In this argument
with his brother-in-law, the reader sees (ironically through his own words) that the brother-in-law is not free, but rather shackled to consumerism and capitalism, just as he also wishes to chain the dog under and into the same system. The two men cannot agree on a subject as small as whether to let a dog run free or keep him chained because their ideologies and basic value systems differ so greatly: Ray values freedom and life, while his brother-in-law values
tradition and wealth.
Many others also view Ray's values as going against tradition, against the grain, but that seems to be even more why he stresses his desire to be defined as "free," instead of "lazy" or "odd." He also possesses an understanding that many who are locked into these restricting societal values desire to be confident and comfortable with a freer lifestyle similar to his own, but either
do not know how to break free from their chains, or do not realize that they are restrained by them:
So what did care about the old tobacco-chewing stickwhittlers at the crossroads store had to say about my mortal eccentricity, we all get to be gum in graves anyway. I even got a little drunk with one of the old men one time and we went driving around the country roads and I actually told him how I was sitting out in those woods meditating and he really rather understood and said he would like to try that if he had time, or if he could get up enough nerve, and had a little rueful envy in his voice. Everybody knows everything. (139)
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