al's first impression of Dean is heroic. He sees Dean as "a young Gene Autry--trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent--a sideburned hero of the snowy West" (Kerouac 5). As taken with Dean's wandering adventurism as Sal was, however, he did not see Dean as a perfected hero. To the contrary, he saw through Dean's sophomoric efforts at intellectualization and spirituality:
And he said, '. . . The thing that I want is the realization of those factors that should one depend on Schopenhauer's dichotomy for any inwardly realized
. . .' He really didn't know what he was talking about . . . Although, mind you, he wasn't so naive as that in all other things (Kerouac 6).
Those "other things" were the ways of the world, and it was Dean's job to initiate Sal into those ways, in exchange for whatever Dean could "con" out of Sal. As Sal declares openly, however, they both knew the basis of their friendship:
Though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and 'how-to-write,' etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn't care and we got along fine. . . . I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me (Kerouac 6-7).
Sal has a reflective self-awareness which is missing from Huck, so that Sal's story of his friendship with Dean is described openly and without irony. Kerouac's intentions seem to be far more obvious that the intentions of Twain, insofar as one can assume their narrators reflect the authors' views on the nature of the two friendships. Kerouac's Sal keeps his friendship with Dean transparent, as in the following passage in which sal describes his thoughts as he enviously follows the shenanigans of Dean and a friend wilder than Sal and therefore m
...