Student Zone

Naked Lunch tells the story of a junkie. He became a junkie by accident (like they all do, right?), because he had $150 dollars coming in every month from a trust fund, so he really had no ambition because the money was there no matter what. He talks a lot about the different ways there is to get junk and gives you a vivid image of different junkies ways of shooting up. He is traveling in Chicago (I’m not sure if that is his starting place?) and talks about getting his junk from the corner of North and Halsted (I thought that was interesting because its like half a block from my house. He also talks about various cities around the country, and the different people he travels with and the different ways they got junk. He also tells you about a few random characters (I’m hoping that their info seems more relevant later in the novel.) The best part of the writing would have to be the way he describes the mentality of a junkie. I think he does this very well and Burroughs really gave me an idea of the train of thought that a junkie has.

The excerpt we have read so far from Naked Lunch makes me feel like I have bit off way more than I can chew, and that was only the first couple paragraphs. I am honestly a bit confused. The streaming consciousness style of writing reminds me of this book I read along time ago, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. Except Wolfe’s style of writing made it very easy to follow, where as Burrough’s writing has no real format or time sequence. Hopefully this will all make more sense as I read more of the novel.

Naked Lunch is a story of a man and his addiction. Burroughs leads us through his journey of find or be found. After not finding a real niche in life he becomes addicted to "junk" and with a group of other men they round the country. They change cars about as many times as they change people and along the journey we are told about the other junkies he meets along the way.
I think that the only thing I know for sure is that I am confused. The one conclusion I do feel strong about is that this has everything to do with modernity. As a child Burroughs tells us how he could not find a place in life. He does not care really for school or the groups of people he meets and that the army is not for him. It is like the world is moving and he is standing still.
Conformity is felt in the sense that The character meets many different types and classes of people along the way. Although lofe has separated them socially, the drugs do not care were you are from.
I also want to comment on the how the authors voice for me carried straight from the intro into the main text. I could feel the same tone only later in the text with the :jargon he introduces,(which by the way I would be lost without). It is very hard to tell where the facts stop and the story starts. Then again there is a haracteristic of good writter.
I do think that I need a little help breaking down the text.
My question is to the professor why did you present the pages in the order that you did or where they taken from different versions?

Naked Lunch by William Burroughs starts with our narrator on the train station platform of the Washington Square Station in New York City. He is catching a train and a man is holding the door for him. He was just lucky enough to get on the train before a narc was able to tail him. He goes on to carry a conversation with the man who just held the door for him. He figures the man is a ‘fruit’ and calls him a square because he trying to be hip. The narrator continues on to narrate of other accounts of meeting addicts from around the states and Tangier, Morroco. One of states that he encounters is Illinois because he mentions Peoria and Chicago. After accounts of addicts having some rather bad reaction to shooting up, we are back to the train station sequence. I think that our narrator is being alert because he has this feeling that there is a narc hiding somewhere in a broom closet waiting to pounce on drug solicitors. After many references to many different and colorful character names we read into ‘The Vigilante’s’ and ‘The Rube’s” story. The Vigilante showcased the grim reality of a junky that is standing trial. Our narrator is showing the rapid and physical changes of this addict like dropping ‘ten pounds in ten minutes’ and how it ‘washed away the human lines.’ The Rube would be known as a hick, an unsophisticated country person. Our narrator has the chance to spend the night in jail with this man. He left the Rube on his to get his fix. Our narrator goes on to tell accounts of his other incidents of users like himself. One of which is a road trip to Mexico.
I guess that maybe from the story that I would be getting a ‘Quentin Tarantino Pulp Fiction-esque’ feel that maybe the narrator might lead that all off these characters would end up meeting in the finale. I found the reading of the narration is very much like Ellison’s “The Invisible Man” because he is just narrating from his own stream of consciousness and how one story gets woven into another. And on page 11 we run into a very familiar quote, “America is not a young land: it is old and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting.” No matter how hard one tries to avoid this ‘evil,’ which it will present itself. One pimp in Mexico is “very puritanical about junk.” I’m still trying to find the context of this sentence. What does it mean?

I'll admit, I have already read the Burroughs selections twice and it will take another two times and perhaps a personal heroin addiction to fully understand just what is going on.

The introductions, obviously written in a more clear headed time for Mr. Burroughs, are very eloquent and well-written. It is evident that
the narrator is a Junkie, not because he wants to be a junkie but because he has nothing better to do: no drive for anything, no need to work hard and earn money, no real challenges. These are all mostlty to do with his $150 check a month that he receives and great boredom, and though no one chooses to be a Junkie, as he notes, it happens almost as a default because there is no greater chase in life to be a part of.

As for the first couple chapters of Naked Lunch, the only thing I can for sure say that I got out of the story, was the absurdness and hysteria and erraticism of being a drug addict. From the first sentence the reader is thrown into a quick written, inconsistent, jumpy frenzy of words and thoughts that could only be described as what I imagine would be the heart beat of a drug addict: rapid, pounding, irregular, skipping, etc.

From reading this, I was unable to think clearly, unable to focus, unable to get a complete grasp of what was going on, to
which I award Mr. Burroughs one compliment: he sure can make the reader FEEL the character.

I found my heart rate accelerating and I felt this pushing, this movement beyond my control in a direction I was unsure of. I found myself stuck in the thought process of a junkie.

Congratulations to Mr. Burroughs for giving me the feeling of what it would be like to be on drugs and for giving me a reason to never want to be. I have had the unfortunate experience of living with drug addicts and this has made me understand their actions a little bit more.

As for the storyline, the most I could grasp from my two readings is that his character is on drugs and located in Chicago (making every corner that I know well suddenly a heroin landmark) and he's unable to stay still in one place.

I suppose I will have to read two more times to fully grasp this.

Summary (William S. Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” is a sweeping autobiographical account of the inner workings of the junky world. However, Burroughs portrays his account not in a conversational tone, but uses thick metaphorical prose that jumps around from scene to scene in an effort to give the reader an idea of his mindset. In short, summarizing “Naked Lunch” is a task beyond my capability. But, I will try my best to decipher):

The story starts out in New York where he befriends (if one would call it that) a lesser-experienced junky and tries to swindle him out of some money by offering him catnip disguised as marijuana. He tells this guy about the “Vigilante,” and how he almost shot him to death in Chicago in a fit of “fag” rage. He admits to deviant sexual encounters to obtain and sell junk, and tells of “Willie the Disk,” (named so because of his “disk mouth,” whatever that means) whom he fears will help the “fuzz” (or police) catch him. The police apparently catch the Vigilante and sentence him to time in the “Federal Nut House.” Then Burroughs jumps to his account of “the Rube.” Apparently, either the Rube is an informant, or (and more likely the case) just so overtly obvious as to his junky habit that the cops have no option but to bust him along with Burroughs and others. So, they end up leaving him at a corner, making an empty promise to come back and get him. From Chicago, they take off through St. Louis and Kansas City on their way to New Orleans, and eventually through Texas and into Mexico where they meet up with Lupita, a friend, who is at the time dealing acid. Then he talks about “the Buyer” who is a narcotics agent that gets hooked on junk and how he single-handedly shook the junky world by bringing down many people in his attempt to keep his job, which he ends up losing. Finally, Burroughs tells of a friend of his, Jane, who hooks up with a “pimp trombone player,” (if I may be so bold) an asshole of a character who has an opinion on everything, and boosts his macho ego by feeding his opinions to his female companions.

Commentary:
I am in awe of Burroughs’ prose in “Naked Lunch.” He is brilliant in his attempt to draw the reader in by using metaphors in almost every sentence to convey his story. It is astounding, yet I’d need a year to read into all that he is saying. Not being a huge fan of poetry, I find it difficult to extract substance from the text, and therefore, it is not an enjoyable read, however amazed I am by it.

It is literature in that 1) you can read it, 2) it strays (in abundance) from ordinary speech, and 3) has tremendous ties to the social movements of the time of the writing. However, so is (in my opinion) his account of “Junky,” which is written in much easier-to-read, conversational prose. “Naked Lunch” is also written in a more whimsical fashion. By that I mean it is told more like a story, with in depth description of character and setting, than “Junky.” However, if both are autobiographical in nature (I’m assuming “Naked Lunch” is too), it seems that “Junky” is a truer rendition of what actually went on in his life.

What I got out of reading "Naked Lunch", was that it is an account of William Burroughs' ventures based on his addiction to heroin. The struggles and pains that came with that lifestyle often forced him to leave places in search of a heroin haven. Well, I believe that's why he moved around. In the prologue of "Junky" he said that heroin is a way of life, which leads me to think that everything he chose to do was based on his drug habit. Burroughs describes encounters with, or stories of, other, heavily addicted individuals and portrays them as rather repulsive and un-human creatures. At the same time I don't think he saw himself the same way. So basically it's a story about living with and for the high of H.
I definitely had a hard time understanding anything that went on in the beginning of the story. I still don't really get it. It wasn't until further into it that his words started to make sense and I started to notice that there was a story to follow. Altogether I like his style of writing and I think that it's meant to confuse the reader. I mean it made me want to figure out what he was trying to say. Anyway, towards the end I got into it and now I look forward to continuing "Naked Lunch."

With the police after him (if only in his head) and the supply of narcotics connections (if not the narcotics themselves) running low Burroughs sets off from New York in an old Studebaker loaded with Heroine for the greener pastures of western lands at the beginning of The Naked Lunch. The first paragraphs draw a line in the sand between the narrator and the world that he inhabits.
His descriptions of the world around him compliment his distinctly personal paranoia of the underworld of drugs. The kid on the train is Burroughs' representation of the faker, the square. The kid is hep instead of hip and knows all about pod and nothing about pot. This is Burroughs' illustration of how outlandish alternative Bohemian culture is to a bona fide Heroin addict. This distinction of the kid as a real alternative square is important because it sets Burroughs off from even those who can consider themselves to be 'in the know'. This is because of 'the reefer madness' the 'what happens to your daughter on a Tuesday night' movie making all the rounds before drive-in horror movies during the early '50s. The brilliancy of starting Naked Lunch here at this point in his story is that is the picture everyone knows and expects and Burroughs as an author can step up to the plate and not even have to take a fast-pitch because the ball is sitting there on the tee; the image is already constructed. He has the ability to affirm all those nightmares — which of course makes creating new ones easier in a number of ways. He can describe everything you have seen on the screen and affirm that the worst fears are true. He can describe everything that he has seen and tell you that your worst fear is a daydream compared to what is coming. Burroughs counterpoint to this rather gratuitous fright tactic is that his nightmare isn't coming from the seething underground where reefer madness is "a pinball machine, with stupid, pink affect." Burroughs' nightmare is coming from your life, where the horror movie precurse to the wolfman howling at the moon with coke nails is your decision to go to college and become a doctor because its your father's dream and you can think I'M FINE where I'm at, I'M OK and, I CAN WATCH THIS MOVIE because ITS OUT THERE and NOT IN HERE never IN HERE: where you don't want to look.

So...I read the parts of the text that I was supposed to read and I'm extremely confused. Sure, I learned that Burroughs was on drugs for years and wrote most of the story for Naked Lunch while he was high -- which reminds me that Stephen King was such an alcoholic for a while that he doesn't remember writing at least one of his books. I think that I've got a fair amount of experience with Burroughs since I just read Cities of the Red Night. I've also recently read Trainspotting, which is a similarly disjointed book about junkies. I can tell that Burroughs's main character is obviously on drugs -- many kinds -- and is going on a road trip, south to Mexico. He vaguely mentions a few cities on his way, meeting a pharmacist he had known five years earlier, scoring random drugs such as couch syrup.

Since I missed a few classes, I can't apply all of these terms, but I think the most valid of all of them is probably the "language made strange." Burroughs has a keen mind for writing things that you sometimes have to read twice before understanding, though his story seems to march on, even without the reader. He breaks almost every grammar rule on his way, using random turns of phrases. He breaks in on himself constantly with footnotes about what he means.

Burroughs's version of modernity is submerged in this fusion of trying to mire his fleeting thoughts into a novel form. To me, this makes what he's going for confusing. I'm not sure yet if he's trying to extoll the virtues of dope or explain how badly these people are messed up by it. I also wish there was a little more back story. At the end of the excerpt I read, he says, "A year later in Tangier I heard she was dead." I have no idea who he's referring to or why he doesn't explain who she is.

I think he's obviously departing from what literature was known as at the time since he's not following perfect grammatical structure (and we all know that's looked down upon in "literature"). His style, however, stays static throughout his writing. I’ve noticed this in the other book he wrote. Cities is all about people on drugs and time travel...or so I thought after reading it. The main point is that though it’s hard to distinguish what he’s talking about, it’s constantly hard to figure out, as opposed to having moments of clarity. It reminds me, as I said before, of Trainspotting, which is written in the perspective of a group of junkies. There are multiple characters and each one talks slightly differently. The author never introduces which one is speaking at the beginning of the chapter and because his voice as a writer is so strong, it’s hard to tell them apart. In Cities, it felt like it was always the same character talking, since Burroughs didn’t introduce who was talking, ever.

Burroughs has a weird, almost pornographic, method of telling his stories. This helps me to understand what’s going on in his mind and the author’s note really drove it home for me: this guy is a messed up individual, but he’s still got a talent for telling exactly what he’s feeling without sugarcoating what he means.