Decadence and the Simulacra: a Perverse Look within Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Anonymous College

Hunter S. Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is his magnum opus and in it, that is exactly what he does, which is to endure a “savage journey to the heart of the American dream”. With an arsenal of drugs and substances to take down any grown person, the protagonist Raoul Duke and his attorney and close friend known only as “Dr. Gonzo” journey into the heart of America and dissect its arteries to see what lies inside. We only have to arrive at page four to be faced with the now infamous passage:

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls… Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can (Thompson).

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas represents the antithesis to Walt Whitman’s America in Leaves of Grass, it is the postmodern vomit of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and it is certainly the perverse afterbirth of...