Naked Lunch: Junkies seeking Junk

Naked Lunch was my first experience with Burroughs. He is the one "Varsity" Beat author I have neglected my attention to. I’ve read And the Hippos were Boiled in there Tanks, but this was co-authored with Keruac.

This novel was incredibly hard to understand. It was fairly easy to read, but the non-linear vignettes made in next to impossible to infer any clear plot. However, I don’t think Burroughs intended to have a solid plot nor do I think it would be a better novel if it had one. It was like reading On the Road on drugs.

From cultural background I knew that the novel spawned from Burroughs notes as a drug addict what he refers to as "Sickness". He says in the introduction, “I have no precise memory of writing the notes which have now been published under the title Naked Lunch.” Reading this first influenced how I read the novel. How could I trust that this was based off real experience if he didn’t even remember writing the notes that made the novel? So, for me, I read it like fiction; a nightmarish fiction about “Junkies” in search of “Junk”.

There is something that I think happens to us a reader reading Naked Lunch and that is that we come as close to being a “Junkie” without doing the “Junk”. Like William Lee (or any of the versions of him in the novel) we slip in out of reality, our time and space shifts with no landmark to keep us sane, and like the drug addict seeking drugs we seek some kind of unity.

On a personal note, Naked Lunch was a Beat novel I found myself most compelled to understand. Kerouac shows us people, places, and events in On the Road. He writes his observations and these observations expose us to the undertones across America. Ginsberg does the same in Howl, describing, but he also prescribes an answer as to why these people, places, and events are the way they are. Burroughs, however, puts us in the mind of a drug addict. He connects with the thinking patterns of a marginalized person. For me, this is the most effective. He isn’t writing about a drug addict, he is a drug addict and he makes us see the world through a Junkies eyes.