Kerouac's insistence that authentic experience requires constant geographic motion predicted not the freedom of travel but the modern impossibility of stillness — where remaining in one place now reads as failure rather than rootedness.
The book makes this clear through Dean Moriarty's driving itself — not the destinations, not the mythic American landscape.
Dean drives because stopping means confronting what he's avoiding. When Sal finally stays put in San Francisco, the prose dies — not metaphorically, but literally.
What Kerouac didn't intend matters less than what the book's mechanics actually deliver: a proof that motion has become the substitute for meaning. Dean's compulsion isn't poetic — it's clinical. He repeats the same routes and drives the same highways back and forth across a continent that stops being vast and starts being a treadmill.
The prediction isn't that everyone would travel more — it's that staying anywhere would eventually feel like giving up. Kerouac wrote the manual for permanent dissatisfaction disguised as liberation.
Read Joyce Carol Oates' essay 'The Myth of American Restlessness' alongside the Mexico City section of On the Road—it's the book's own argument turned against itself.
Ann Charters' introduction to the scroll manuscript (the original teletype draft) reveals Kerouac wrote this in a drugged sprint specifically to avoid revision—the form itself enacts the compulsion the content describes.