Dean Moriarty's marital situation

Dean Moriarty's marital situation is defined by rapid reversals rather than lasting resolution: he divorces Camille, remarries Inez, leaves Inez almost at once to return to Camille, and later finds himself expelled from Inez's home while Camille invites him back. The sequence makes marriage both a recurring practical crisis and a measure of the distance between Dean's declarations of permanence and his continuing movement across the country.

The Mexico City divorce and return to Inez

In Mexico City, while Sal is feverish with dysentery, Dean tells him that he has obtained a divorce from Camille and intends to drive to New York that night to return to Inez, provided the car holds out. The news arrives as part of Dean's explanation for leaving Sal sick behind, but it also marks a fresh turn in his own domestic life: the relationship with Camille is declared over, and the earlier marriage to Inez is again his immediate destination.

Dean's plan is tied to the failing car and a long journey. He drives out of Mexico City, sees Victor again in Gregoria, and pushes the vehicle as far as Lake Charles before its rear end drops on the road. He wires Inez for airplane fare and flies the remaining distance. The sequence links the change in his marital status to the same improvisational travel that shapes his life: when the car fails, he finds another way to reach the next household and the next promised beginning.

A remarriage followed by another departure

Dean arrives in New York with divorce papers in hand, and he and Inez immediately go to Newark and marry. Yet the reunion does not hold him there. That night, after reassuring Inez that everything is all right and telling her not to worry, he boards a bus and heads back across the continent to San Francisco, aiming to rejoin Camille and their two baby girls.

The contrast between the wedding and the overnight departure is stark. Dean has just formalized his return to Inez, but his next action is to leave her for Camille. The narration describes him as making explanations where there is only immense sorrow and strain, exposing the gap between his efforts to impose a reassuring logic on events and the pain those events produce. By the time he reaches the other side of the country, he is three times married, twice divorced, and living with his second wife, Camille: the arithmetic records a settled domestic arrangement only after a succession of reversals.

Conflicting promises in New York

During a later three-day visit to New York, Dean speaks of both marriages as if each can be made secure. Asked about Camille, he says she has given permission and is waiting for him, and that they are now entirely reconciled. Asked about Inez, he says he wants her to come back to San Francisco and live on the other side of town. His answers place incompatible domestic futures side by side, while his uncertainty about why he came to New York leaves the visit itself unsettled.

Dean also says that he wanted to see Sal and Sal's beloved, and that he still loves Sal. But the visit ends not in a stable plan but in another departure: he hastily prepares to cross the continent again, while Sal and his companions cannot afford a truck to go with him. Dean spends one night with Inez explaining, sweating, and fighting; she throws him out. The immediate consequence of his divided promises is therefore not a shared household with both women, but renewed conflict and expulsion.

Camille's letter and the unsettled settlement

A letter from Camille, sent in Dean's care, responds to his departure with affection and worry. She recalls seeing him cross the railway tracks with his bag, prays that he will return safely, and says she wants Sal and his friend to live on the same street. She presents the household as awaiting Dean, and signs the letter together with Amy and Little Joanie. Her words make the domestic future he had described in New York tangible: Camille and the children are not simply a destination in his account but a family explicitly inviting him back.

The narrator consequently describes Dean's life as settled with Camille, his most constant, embittered, and knowing wife. That apparent settlement remains framed by the reversals that precede it: Dean has just been thrown out by Inez after remarrying her, and Camille's welcome follows his repeated departures and returns. The marital situation closes not with a clean resolution of the competing bonds, but with Camille's letter offering continuity amid Dean's recurring instability.