Naked Lunch

Compared to what precedes them, the final chapters of Naked Lunch represent a return to reality. Despite the continuing experimental style and questioning of narrative authority, evident when the men Lee claims to have killed turn out not to have existed, this section gives a sense of “waking up” from the drug-inspired visions and pyrotechnics of earlier chapters. The most obvious way this occurs is through place. References to real New York locations, such as Queens Plaza, creep into the narrative. Then, we learn that Lee is no longer in Interzone but back in his New York apartment, where police are about to arrest him. However, a deeper thematic sense of “return”—which the final chapters draw out—mirrors the spatial one: a metaphorical and philosophical awakening that concerns the effects and damage of sustained drug use, especially of heroin.

This is first evident in the apartment of The Sailor. Going there with a boy to take heroin, his living space is filthy, containing “moldy objects […] supports and bandages” (169), and “dirty dishes” (170). It—and his body—smells of “dusty locker rooms, swimming pool chlorine, dried semen” (169). His situation screams of neglect and indifference. He has sacrificed ordinary standards of hygiene and cleanliness for a dependency on drugs and is living in squalor. The narrative describes something similar when Lee starts using heroin in front of the police officers: “I started probing for a vein. It’s a wildly unpretty spectacle” (177). Viewed soberly, hard drug use is ugly and destructive. It leaves one deformed, as evident in the “black scars of junk” (167) on the boy’s face, and warps the psyche, causing terror, anxiety, and—in the case of cocaine use—formication.

However, these aren’t even the worst effects, as The Sailor explains when telling the boy that the true price of heroin is “time […] five minutes here… an hour someplace else… two… four… eight… Every day die a little” (170). Heroin takes up time in the sense of eradicating consciousness for minutes or hours on end, when the user is comatose after taking the drug. It also costs time in the sense that, for the user, time becomes organized around the drug. This is what Lee refers to as running on “junk time” (167). It happens when the user spends even the time not using organizing and waiting for the arrival of heroin, as The Sailor does in the cafe. Additionally, time evaporates in the sense that the drug is killing the user. Lee’s anecdote Lee about a recovered user who relapsed symbolizes this loss. As he says, “I saw it happen […] ten pounds lost in ten minutes […] standing there with the syringe in one hand […] holding his pants up with the other” (195). In this instance, heroin eats away part of the user’s body just as it can take years off the user’s life.

At the same time, heroin kills in a more imminent way. Abuse of the drug doesn’t just radically reduce life expectancy and, eventually, cause death; it also destroys one’s sense of place and self. As Lee says in Tangier, “I don’t know what I am doing there nor who I am” (184). He has become dislocated from the world, temporally and spatially, and hence from any coherent sense of identity. He has lost any proper sense of personal narrative. As Lee says, when a tourist asks him what he’s thinking, “Morphine having depressed my hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion […] I must report virtual absence of cerebral event” (192). In other words, having used too much morphine—a substitute for heroin—he has irreversibly numbed the emotional and libidinal parts of his brain. However, because the “back,” emotional aspect of the brain motivates the rational front part of the brain to work, the “thinking” front part has atrophied too. Thus, Lee can’t think or connect to the world either emotionally or rationally. He has stranded himself in a senseless, living death, in which only the need for the next fix moves him. In this way, Lee pays a heavy personal price to voyage into Interzone. The creative vision he extricated from his experience, which the notebooks he saves from the police represent, comes at the cost of both his sanity and his life.