Naked Lunch is one of those novels that may or may not withstand the test of time. Though it is one of the most acclaimed and influential novels of the last century, it did not have a very great impact on me personally. It’s described as “satire,” but I found it less humorous and more absurd. The vulgarity for me was also too much, and I found many of the depictions of homosexuals and foreigners to be problematic. It could be a matter of personal taste, but I did not find much that was so groundbreaking at the time. Certainly there was plenty of obscenity, but Kerouac and Ginsberg got there first. Such obscenity is so prominent in today’s culture that one can doubt if Naked Lunch has as much of an impact now as it did then.
What I did find interesting were the strange worlds that the narrator found himself in. However, I found it frustrating that I couldn’t really ground myself in any specific type of world. I chalk this up to the structure of the novel, which doesn’t really tell an overarching story, but several little stories loosely strung together with a character whose identity is multifaceted and unknown. One couldn’t know who was the narrator in sections that utilized the third person, and the nature of the narrator’s reality is constantly called into question, as he is always fucked up on some drug and hardly a reliable source about the reality of the world surrounding him. Cool images were conjured up by the artful language, but they were fleeting, lost in the murky waters of confusion. The proliferation of slang and made-up words also made the narratives difficult to follow, and one can definitely make an accurate guess about its age even without knowing about the Beat generation. However, Naked Lunch succeeded in constructing the consciousness of a drug junkie: a consciousness most of us are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with. For this, I commend Burroughs and his prose.
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