William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch: My thoughts

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Let's not mince words: I could not get past the first dang chapter. No. Wait. Let me start earlier.

(The following is written in Burroughs' seemingly alien language)
One day, I was in a Books-A-Million in Savannah, looking for more junk too stimulate my book craven an saw William S. Burroughs' crazy lit soft based on his experiences with junk, brain-movies and mugwumps devouring an elephant whole on a hot summer day in the middle of San Francisco's Castro district during a pride parade full of queens and kings performing choreographed to Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'". I drop gold dookies and unicorns that warblewarblewarble police sirens then you choke on a gorilla's (sic)... vomit... Twilight sucks... static... I love you, Ms. Ringwald... dmoibmdsjnmomnjsdmvfmwroimdv,oppx,opwmkoirmfo,s,em.

What I'm trying to say is that Naked Lunch is an incomprehensible mess. Burroughs seemed more concerned with delivering rambling prose than attempting introduce a shred of coherency. I have nothing against stream-of-consciousness narratives, but there is a method to the madness. Take me as an example. When I write a story containing a narrative, I throw the thoughts that my characters are forming inside their brains and glue them together to form a tapestry. Burroughs does none of this. Instead of humor, he uses dirty high school locker room banter. Instead of character, Burroughs delivers an overdose of, well, Burroughs. I think the moral of this story is: don't let literary madness consume that much of you.

Burroughs was up to date and maybe even in advance in his time.
Now... it's another day, another story, another way of life.
I'm sure he would write otherwise nowadays.

...




Or maybe not

At least I find Burroughs much easier to understand than Kerouac.

"I can think of at least two things wrong with that title."

I didn't think much of it either. Most po-mo literary gimmicks just make me want to go read something else. Junkie is a great read, however. Do read that.

Never bothered with Kerouac. I suspect I'm too old now.

I'm not pretending to understand Naked Lunch, though I'm not really sure you're supposed to. I just sat back with the book, and let the weird images run through my brain.

-Bill, otherwise known as Kraichgauer

The point of the novel is to question what a novel is. Originally, a novel meant "bits of news strung together" - hence why there are chapters in most novels. Now what if you took that idea and shredded those bits of news into finer bits?

Lets not mince words. I read the book six times.
Recently I picked up somebody else's copy and had to tear myself away from it.
I've read a lot of his other books, too.
Saw him live twice.
Watched both documentaries (the second one twice.)
As my father used to say, "with taste and scent no argument."

First time I attempted to read Naked Lunch, I only made it through a few pages.

A few months back I decided to sit down and plow through it, and honestly I really enjoyed it. The style is really difficult and hard to follow--I interpret it as stream of consciousness from a heroin addict--fragmented and delusional at times. If you read through the entire book, it starts to tie together a bit--recurring motifs and such.

It also helped me to get through it by laughing at it--his dumb perverse humor, or sometimes the sheer incomprehensibility of sections.

He does do a great job of capturing speech/syntax/dialogue.

I actually thought Kerouac [only have read 'On the Road'] was more mature--journalistic almost --I was pleasantly surprised by it.

Just my two (or three) cents

--David