Naked Luch

Naked Lunch

William S. Burroughs was one the main three writers of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He came from an aristocratic St. Louis family and attended the best prep schools. He was expelled from one after experimenting with chloral hydrate. Throughout his youth he struggled with acceptance of his homosexuality. He graduated from with honors from Harvard University in 1936, but hated the school and town so he moved to New York. He began to explore the Harlem Renaissance and the art movements in Greenwich Village. He first began to experiment with heroin in 1944 and became an addict. He got married to Joan Vollmer and they had one child. In 1948, the family moved to New Orleans, but had to move to Mexico after Burroughs was arrested for conspiracy to traffic narcotics. In 1951, Burroughs accidentally shot and killed his wife while performing a William Tell trick. The tragedy was a life altering occurrence that sent Burroughs into journey though South America looking for the drug yage. After his travels in South America ended, Burroughs moved to Tangier, Morocco where he began to work on the novel Naked Lunch.

Burroughs’s wrote Naked Lunch heavily under the influence of drugs. His drug of choice was heroin or a substitute opiate of some kind, but he also used cocaine, a hallucinogenic herb known as yage, and many other random drugs. The title of the book as suggested by Jack Kerouac who said it meant “A frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.” The title makes perfect sense in this regard, for Naked Lunch is a brutally honest introspective look at modern society. The novel serves many purposes; as a poignant satire on all the hypocrisies of modern society and as an unforgiving firsthand account of the joys and pains of drug addiction. It eerily predicted the AIDS epidemic, the crack epidemics and how plastic surgery would become very prominent. It was banned in many countries, including parts of the U.S, upon it release and was the last novel to face a major literary censorship battle in the U.S.

The novel is one large satire of society but especially criticizes the government, Capitalism, civil rights, the U.S, and the European colonization of Africa. Burroughs parallels the government’s lust for control to an addict’s lust for drugs. He say’s that “…control can never be a means to any practical end…it can never be a means to anything but more control… like junk...” Burroughs is saying that all the government is going to do by taking more control is wind up taking more control, and that taking more control will never end any problems, just lead to more. And like when a governments control becomes overwhelming, like an addicts addiction, the only way to stop it is through drastic means. Burroughs is sometimes discreet in his attacks on the government and at other times blatant.

“The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised…Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action, to the complete parasitism of a virus.”

Burroughs believes that all that bureaucracy is doing stifling the human spirit, eliminating human individuality and will essentially turn us all into brainwashed mind slaves. Burroughs was not to far off in this thinking. At the time of writing this novel, the