I think of Dean Moriarty
On the Road“I think of Dean Moriarty” is the closing expression of a novel shaped by movement and return. At the end, the narrator sits on a broken-down river pier in New Jersey and imagines the immense land stretching west, its roads and dreamers, before naming Dean twice and the missing Old Dean Moriarty between those repetitions. The phrase makes remembrance—not arrival—the final destination of the journey.
The Expression at the Ending
The closing passage begins with a broad view of America at dusk: the river pier, the long skies over New Jersey, and the land rolling toward the West Coast. Its scale opens outward to people dreaming across the country, then contracts to a particular absence. The narrator thinks of Dean, recalls Old Dean Moriarty, the father they never found, and returns to Dean. That repeated naming gives the expression its shape: memory circles back without resolving the loss it carries.
The refrain also follows an intimate separation. Dean has walked away alone, and the narrator watches him disappear around the corner of Seventh Avenue. Laura is nearly in tears; the narrator reassures her, but privately imagines Dean’s more than three-thousand-mile return journey and understands that he had come east to see him. The final expression carries that knowledge forward, making the last act of the book a thought of Dean rather than a report of what happens next.
Roads as Memory
The phrase gathers force from the many journeys that precede it. In 1947, the narrator begins west by studying a map and choosing Route 6, which runs from Cape Cod toward Ely, Nevada, before dipping toward Los Angeles. His first day is not a smooth launch: after rides north to Bear Mountain, he is caught in torrents of rain, shelterless beside the road, and doubts what he is doing there. The westward journey is therefore remembered not as a single triumphant passage but through particular routes, delays, and reversals.
The homeward bus ride in October provides another kind of return. The narrator travels through Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, then pauses by the Mississippi River in St. Louis to watch logs floating down from Montana. Those logs become an image of a continental journey, while the bus carries him east toward home. The closing vision of a land spanning from New Jersey to the West Coast echoes this earlier movement: geography persists as a storehouse of remembered crossings.
Other returns are measured by repetition and speed. In Iowa and Illinois, the narrator recognizes places encountered on earlier travels, including Newton and Davenport, while Dean drives east at relentless pace. Their Denver-to-Chicago run covers 1,180 miles in seventeen hours of driving time, and a near collision on a narrow Illinois bridge makes the journey’s velocity perilously concrete. In the final passage, the great distance is no longer a record to be driven; it is the space across which memory travels.
Crossing and the Unknown
The expression also resonates with the journey south into Mexico. After crossing the Rio Grande, Dean and the narrator leave the familiar United States behind and enter a desert where dawn reveals yucca and organ-pipe cactus. Dean describes the crossing as entry into an unknown phase; the road then climbs from desert into the mountains and toward the plateau above Monterrey. These episodes make the road a threshold between known and unknown worlds, while the ending turns the same continental vastness into a landscape of thought.
The Mississippi crossing in Louisiana offers a more fluid image of passage. In darkness and rain, the travelers cross near Port Allen, and the river becomes a current of places and waters running toward the Gulf. Elsewhere, the return east carries the narrator past the Mississippi again, this time through the softer landscapes of Illinois. The book’s roads do not lead to a single settled meaning: rivers, plains, cities, and borders recur in altered circumstances, each return adding another layer to the narrator’s recollection.
Dean and the Unfinished Search
The final mention of Old Dean Moriarty connects the remembered friend to a search that never reaches its object. The narrator recalls the father as someone “we never found,” placing the unresolved paternal absence inside the same sentence-pattern as Dean’s name. The passage does not explain or solve that absence; instead, it makes the missing father part of what remembering Dean entails.
The closing movement from Dean to his father and back to Dean is both personal and structural. Across the novel, journeys repeatedly begin again, and familiar places are revisited without becoming final homes. At the end, the narrator’s view widens to the whole country and then narrows to one absent friend. “I think of Dean Moriarty” thus closes the book not by completing the road, but by showing what remains when the driving stops: the land, the lost father, and a friendship that continues as thought.
