The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

The opening three chapters, which describe Wolfe’s initial impressions of Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, foreground Wolfe’s own experience of the group and introduce his complex narratorial presence. Wolfe is involved but detached, and he writes with a sense of irony and humor. A brief passage in Chapter 1 illustrates this. Here, Wolfe gestures towards the narrative arc of the story that his book will tell, but his voice is playful and ironic: “What was it that had brought a man so high of promise to so low a state so short a time? Well, the answer can be found in just one short word, my friends, in just one all-well-used syllable: Dope!” Wolfe writes in a self-conscious and lively literary language that mixes the formal and the informal, the serious and the comic.

Wolfe’s descriptions of the Counterculture in these chapters are alternately admiring and satirical. He enjoys the spectacle and the countercultural penchant for ostentation, but the narrative also foregrounds a critical component. The very first words, for example, express gentle sarcasm: “That’s good thinking there, Cool Breeze.” Cool Breeze is a Prankster young man who has just told the narrator that he is lying low because he is on probation. However, Wolfe notes that Cool Breeze is at that very moment “sitting up in plain view of thousands of already startled citizens wearing some kind of Seven Dwarfs Black Forest gnome’s hat covered in feathers and fluorescent colors” on the back of a truck making its way through the crowded city with thousands of curious onlookers staring.

Chapter 1 is called “Black Shiny FBI Shoes,” which are the opposite, in terms of style and significance, from the counterculture’s outlandish fashion: “The cops now know the whole scene,” Wolfe writes, “even the costumes, the jesuschrist strung-out hair, Indian beads, Indian headbands, donkey beads, temple bells, amulets, mandalas, god’s eyes, fluorescent vests, unicorn horns, Errol Flynn dueling shirts.” The police, however, have not figured out the shoes: “[T]hey still don’t know about the shoes,” he adds (3). Wolfe goes on to explain that “the heads have a thing about shoes,” (3) and that they prefer boots of various types.

In Chapter 2, the narrator focuses on his interactions with the Pranksters at the Warehouse. Finding himself immersed in their milieu, he notes a strange feeling coming over him. Much of the chapter is devoted to Wolfe marveling at the almost programmatic commitment of the Pranksters to being odd and taking acid. The strangeness produces a sense of significance, but what anything signifies is mysterious: “Everything in everybody’s life is […] significant. And everybody is alert, watching for the meanings. And the vibrations. There is no end of vibrations” (20).

Finally, in Chapter 3, the feelings that the narrator mentioned at the beginning of Chapter 2, coupled with the sense of meaning, issue in a weird experience of Intersubjectivity for the narrator. Although he came to the Warehouse with a skeptical mind, he now writes, “I am suddenly experiencing their feeling” (27). He describes his surprise at this: “I am sure of it. I feel like I am in on something the outside world…could not possibly comprehend, and it is a metaphor, the whole scene, ancient and vast” (27). The trope of a first-person narrator who is led to a strange locale and overwhelmed by the sights and sounds is a highly literary one, while the focus on the author’s subjective experience exemplifies the style preferred by New Journalism.