Roll Greb

Roll Greb is a scholar whose scholarship and wild physical expressiveness converge in a single, unforgettable presence. During a New York party weekend, his uninhibited performance captivates Dean Moriarty: Dean calls him the greatest and most wonderful person, and takes his way of living as a possible route toward “IT.”

Identity and Presence

Roll lives in a house on Long Island with his aunt, who is expected to leave him the house when she dies. In the meantime, she rejects his wishes, dislikes his friends, prowls upstairs during his party, and threatens to call the police. Roll answers her with an outburst, then carries on with the gathering. The house is both a place of constraint and the setting for his noisy self-invention.

His intellectual life is materially visible in two rooms of books, stacked from floor to ceiling around every wall. Among them is a ten-volume work on the Apocrypha. Yet Roll is no quiet keeper of books: he plays Verdi operas and pantomimes them in pajamas torn down the back. His learning spills into physical comedy, theatricality, and movement.

Performance and Conduct

The narration presents Roll in a series of bodily extremes. He reels through New York’s waterfront carrying original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouts in the streets, and crawls through them like a large spider. In his excitement, he lisping, writhing, flopping, moaning, howling, and falling back in despair; he can barely get words out because he is so overwhelmed by life. His neck rolls in spasms, and his eyes seem to flash with fiendish light.

These details make his abandon more than a declared attitude: it is a performance that consumes his whole body. At the party, Roll’s exuberance has no measured or decorous form. His scholar’s seriousness, his ridiculous pajamas, and his unrestrained gestures coexist without resolving into a socially acceptable persona. The result is at once comic and compelling.

Influence on Dean Moriarty

Dean watches Roll with his head bowed, repeating “Yes . . . Yes . . . Yes.” He tells Sal Paradise that Roll is the greatest and most wonderful of all, and explains that Roll is what he himself wants to be: never hung up, moving in every direction, letting everything out, and having nothing to do but rock back and forth. Dean imagines that living this way might eventually allow a person to “get it.”

When Sal Paradise asks what “it” means, Dean cries, “IT! IT!” but says there is no time to explain, then rushes back to watch Roll. The exchange makes Roll the object of an intense, unfinished act of interpretation. Dean sees in him not merely a wild party guest but a figure who seems to embody the unrestrained life Dean is trying to name.

Narrative Significance

Roll’s appearance links intellectual abundance with ecstatic motion: the books and manuscripts do not anchor him to scholarly stillness but accompany a life lived at full pitch. For Dean, Roll offers an image of freedom from inhibition, one he can imitate in his repeated affirmations but cannot fully explain. The scene’s tension lies in the gap between the certainty of Dean’s response and the mystery of what he hopes to reach through it.

Dean then extends the comparison to George Shearing, whom he says is exactly like Roll. At Birdland, Shearing rocks as he plays, while Dean sweats and exclaims behind him; the musical performance gives a new setting to the same search for ecstatic release. Roll’s role is brief, but his example helps define Dean’s longing for a state in which intellect, body, and motion seem to become one.