Naked Lunch

NAKED LUNCH, the controversial masterpiece by Beat Generation founding father William S. Burroughs, has the distinction of being the last novel banned in the United States. Decried as obscene, the novel uses frank and extremely graphic depictions of drug use and sex as metaphors for the human condition: all of humanity, Burroughs feels, is victimized by some form of addiction. The fractured timeline follows Bill Lee (a name Burroughs occasionally used as a pseudonym) from New York to Tangiers and then into an alternate reality called the Interzone. Based on his own experiences as an addict and incorporating the hallucinatory disjointedness of habitual use and withdrawal, Burroughs's stream-of-consciousness narrative portrays the stages of an addiction to opiates. The novel's structure and timeline disintegrate as Lee's drug habit spins further and further out of control. With stylistic elements borrowed from popular culture (including detective stories, science fiction, and pornography), the work is at once blackly comic and suffused with Burroughs's famously paranoid view of the world. Copyright (C) Muze Inc. 2005. For personal use only. All rights reserved.