Remi Boncoeur

Remi Boncoeur is Sal Paradise’s old friend and one of the first people to give his westward journey a destination, a job, and a place to stay. A Frenchman with grand plans and an exuberant, generous manner, he tries to turn an improvised life in Mill City into a shared future; the gap between that vision and the cramped, contentious reality of the shack gives their friendship both its warmth and its strain. His final appearance, years later in New York, returns him to the narrative as a loyal friend whose careful plans cannot keep Sal and Dean Moriarty together.

Identity and Background

Remi is a Frenchman brought up in Paris and an old prep-school friend of Sal. Before Sal fully understands his unpredictable nature, Remi has already written from San Francisco with a plan: Sal should come west and ship out with him on an around-the-world liner. Remi believes he can secure Sal a place in the engine room. Sal is willing to take any freighter that will let him make long Pacific voyages and earn enough to support himself while he finishes his book. The proposal links adventure to practical need, though its promise depends on a ship Remi has yet to obtain.

Remi offers a shack in Mill City as a place where Sal can write while they wait for the shipping arrangements. He lives there with Lee Ann, whom he describes in his letter as an excellent cook. Sal’s picture of his friend is initially incomplete: Remi is a “really mad guy,” as Sal later puts it, but he does not yet know how far that description will reach. The shack, the hoped-for voyage, and the promise of uninterrupted writing form the hopeful terms on which Sal begins his westward trip.

Their friendship predates Mill City and carries an old complication. At prep school Remi introduced Sal to the woman who became Sal’s former wife, after Remi himself had found her first. Remi brought Sal to meet her; within a week, she was going with Sal. The incident remains a point of connection rather than a settled grievance. Sal recalls Remi as loyal and genuinely affectionate toward him, despite the romantic history that might have separated them.

Mill City: Hospitality and Hardship

When Sal reaches the shack, Remi is asleep beside Lee Ann on a bed he had stolen from a merchant ship. The extravagant image is characteristic: Remi later tells Sal how he sneaked over the ship’s side at night with the bed and rowed it ashore. His life combines resourcefulness with a flair for the improbable, and even the shack’s furniture carries the marks of that restless improvisation.

The day-to-day household is less romantic. Remi waits for a ship and earns his living as a special guard in barracks across the canyon. He wears shorts and an Army cap around the shack; Lee Ann keeps her hair in pincurls. They save pennies through the week, quarrel bitterly, and then spend fifty dollars on a Saturday night out, appearing together as if they were successful Hollywood characters. Their routine moves between deprivation and display, domestic hostility and a brief performance of prosperity.

Remi welcomes Sal with a huge laugh, backslaps, and a shouted greeting after Sal arrives two weeks late. The exuberance is not merely social warmth: Remi treats Sal as indispensable to the life he is trying to build. He imagines Sal staying in the shack to write an original story for a Hollywood studio, while Remi flies south in a stratosphere liner with a harp under his arm to make them rich. Lee Ann is to go with him, and he plans to introduce her to his friend’s father, a famous director and intimate of W. C. Fields. The scheme gives each person a role in a future of artistic success and social arrival.

Sal spends his first week writing a gloomy New York story. Remi can barely read it, but carries it to Hollywood a few weeks later; Lee Ann is too bored and resentful to read it. Sal writes through rainy hours over coffee, then admits the story will not work and asks Remi to find him a job because he cannot keep depending on the couple for cigarettes. Remi is disappointed, but still acts on his friend’s need. He arranges the same kind of barracks work he has himself.

The job makes Sal a special policeman. He is sworn in by the local police chief and given a badge and club. Until he obtains his own uniform trousers, he wears Remi’s: too long for him, they flap around his legs, while Remi’s height and potbelly make the borrowed clothes an awkward fit. Remi also lends him a flashlight and his .32 automatic. The practical help is characteristic of the friendship, but it places Sal inside Remi’s precarious working life rather than the literary and maritime escape they had first imagined.

Loyalty Under Pressure

The household’s quarrels eventually become an immediate crisis. As the rain worsens, Lee Ann tells Remi to pack and leave the shack, which she says she occupied first. Remi begins packing; when he pushes her, she lunges for the gun. He gives the weapon to Sal and tells him to hide it. Lee Ann goes out in the mud to find a police officer, returns soaked when the officer is not home, and the scene leaves Sal frightened and unsure why he is so far from home. The gun Remi had lent him for work becomes, for a moment, an object to conceal from the conflict in the house.

In the middle of the dispute, Remi speaks quietly and sincerely. He says that he had not expected roses and moonshine when he took up with Lee Ann, and that he is not surprised by the present trouble. He feels he has tried to do things for both her and Sal: he went to Hollywood, got Sal a job, bought Lee Ann dresses, and tried to introduce them to people in San Francisco. His complaint is not that he was owed repayment; he says he asked for nothing in return. What hurts him is the failure of the shared plan he had imagined—something fine and lasting that would come of them together.

Remi’s last request is modest in form but emotionally important to him. His stepfather, a distinguished doctor who had practiced in Vienna, Paris, and London, is due in San Francisco the following Saturday. Remi wants Lee Ann to appear as his girl and Sal as his friend, so that his stepfather will believe the account Remi has given him and leave without worrying. To finance the evening, Remi plans to borrow one hundred dollars. Sal points out that the doctor has more money than Remi will ever have and that Remi will go into debt. The exchange lays bare the contrast between Remi’s wish to present a coherent, successful life and the poverty and conflict that make the performance costly.

Reappearances and the Final Parting

The novel’s repeated journeys carry Sal past Mill City again. On a later visit, he notices that the old ship Admiral Freebee is no longer in the bay and that Remi is no longer in the shack’s second-to-last compartment. A young woman opens the door; Sal and Dean speak with her, while Roy Johnson waits in the car reading a novel. Sal takes one last look at Mill City and decides there is no point trying to recover the complicated past. The place remains recognizable, but the people and arrangements that once made it Remi’s home have disappeared.

Remi returns in New York after traveling around the world several times on ships. Sal wants him to meet Dean, and the two men do meet, but Dean can no longer talk and says nothing; Remi turns away. The reunion is marked not by the old laughter or by a new scheme, but by the absence of conversation. Remi has achieved the seafaring travel once imagined in Mill City, yet the meeting gives him no renewed access to Dean.

That evening, Remi has tickets for a Duke Ellington concert at the Metropolitan Opera and insists that Sal, Laura, and Remi’s girlfriend, Vicki, join him. He is now fat and sad, but remains an eager, formal gentleman who wants things done properly. He arranges for his bookie to drive them in a Cadillac and has a special necktie made for the occasion. The tie reproduces the concert tickets, bears the four guests’ names, and includes jokes and favorite sayings, among them “You can't teach the old maestro a new tune.” Its whimsical care gives the evening a private ceremony, as if Remi could still make a gathering meaningful through preparation and style.

Dean stands outside the car with his bag, ready to go to Penn Station and cross the country again. He asks Sal if he can ride with them to Fortieth Street, saying that he wants to be with Sal as long as possible and that it is bitterly cold. Sal asks Remi, but Remi refuses: he likes Sal, he says, but does not like Sal’s foolish friends. Sal does not begin another argument that would derail the evening, recalling that he has previously spoiled Remi’s plans. Dean cannot ride uptown with them. Sal waves from the back seat, and Dean walks off alone, turning the corner of Seventh Avenue with his eyes on the street ahead.

Narrative Role and Significance

Remi’s story is shaped by the contrast between plans and their material conditions. The ocean voyage, the Hollywood story, the imagined fortune, and the carefully staged evening with his stepfather all promise a life larger and more orderly than the one he inhabits. Yet his actual resources are a canyon shack, guard work, borrowed money, and a household in which a gun has to be hidden. His dreams are not simply empty: he works to find Sal employment, lends him equipment, and tries to draw Lee Ann and Sal into a future he genuinely wants to share. Their failure gives his generosity a melancholy edge.

His relationship with Sal also provides a measure of continuity amid the novel’s repeated departures. Remi remains affectionate despite the history of Sal’s former wife; he welcomes Sal into his home, helps him earn a living, and later seeks to bring him into a carefully arranged night of music. But friendship does not make him infinitely accommodating. In New York he refuses Dean’s request, and Sal chooses not to challenge him. The final scene therefore makes Remi neither a mere benefactor nor a simple obstacle: he is a friend with his own loyalties and limits, whose attempt to preserve an evening ends beside Dean’s solitary departure.