How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #21
Then I got fever and became delirious and unconscious. Dysentery. I looked up out of the dark swirl of my mind and I knew I was on a bed eight thousand feet above sea level, on a roof of the world, and I knew that I had lived a whole life and many others in the poor atomistic husk of my flesh, and I had all the dreams. And I saw Dean bending over the kitchen table. It was several nights later and he was leaving Mexico City already. "What you doin, man?" I moaned. (IV.6.27)
While Dean has reached a state of sober spirituality, it is only in feverish dreams that Sal contemplates such matters as "the poor atomic husk" of his body.
Quote #22
In the fall I myself started back home from Mexico City and one night just over Laredo border in Dilley, Texas, I was standing on the hot road underneath an arc-lamp with the summer moths smashing into it when I heard the sound of footsteps from the darkness beyond, and lo, a tall old man with flowing white hair came clomping by with a pack on his back, and when he saw me as he passed, he said, "Go moan for man," and clomped on back to his dark. Did this mean that I should at last go on my pilgrimage on foot on the dark roads around America? I struggled and hurried to New York (V.1.2)
The line "Go moan for man" is certainly cryptic, but this is the second time we’ve seen the old man with white hair. Something is up. Sal, too, struggles with meaning, but the line reeks of existential dread, of Sal’s sadness, and his literal need to moan and grieve over his own state and the state of America.