Addiction

A quick popular culture reference for consideration.

A movie came out in recent history about an effect Jack seems to suffer from. The Hurt Locker is about a man who enlists and is deployed to a bomb squad in Iraq, leaving behind his wife and young child. He becomes the leader of his bomb team when his predecessor is terminated by a radio activated improvised explosive. He comes close to death very, very many times, and survives to return home to his family. He eventually confesses to his son (please pardon the excessively long quote)

"You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don't ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older... some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you'll realize it's just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it's only one or two things. With me, I think it's one."

He then proceeds to reenlist in the armed forces, with the same position he previously held.

I am still fairly early on in the book. So pardon me for getting what I've heard about what is ahead wrong, or reiterating what you already know. But at one point in the opening, Jack says

"I was beginning to get the bug like Neal. In all, what Neal was, simply, was tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and also to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him."

As Jack had said he had caught the bug.

"I shambled after as usual as I've been doing all my life after people that interest me, because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yawn or say a commonplace thing.. but burn, burn, bur like roman candles across the night."

The problems these two characters face seem completely different in nature. One believes that he can only abide by one life, and the other decides he cannot choose. But the nature of the problem is the same. Each has experienced a situation nearly surreal in nature, the character from The Hurt Locker, experienced war, a location so different than anything else imaginable, and Jack Kerouac "caught the bug" from Neal, went out on the road, and most likely made drug use a norm. (At one point Jack says he had collected 50 from his veteran benefits, suggesting a tour in World War II.) Whatever the experience, they have come into contact with a reality so entirely different than that of an average citizen.

With this contact, civilian life suddenly seems mundane, routine, and quite harshly pointless. They lose all connections to it, when they find a reality that they deem for better or worse "more exciting", than the life they experience at home, and therefore cannot abide by it. Therefore they find the only option to keep searching for that rush they have become so addicted to. The reason Jack Kerouac moves so frequently, I would argue, is because of an addiction to the rush that he can only find On The Road.