Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1971

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-6

Part 1, Chapters 7-12

Part 2, Chapters 1-7

Part 2, Chapters 8-14

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Music, Drugs, and the 1960s

As Raoul says, “a week in Vegas is like stumbling into a Time Warp, a regression to the late fifties… people like Sinatra and Dean Martin are still considered ‘far out’ in Vegas” (156). Las Vegas likes to bill itself as the entertainment capital of the world. In reality, though, in terms of music, what it serves up is both dated and anodyne. Thus, “Tom Jones can make $75,000 a week” (155) there and it is associated with acts like Barbara Streisand. In short, music in Vegas is something non-threatening and designed for easy consumption. In contrast, music for Raoul and Gonzo is jarring, timely, and provocative. Music serves as means of emphasizing and elevating extreme experiences. For example, as Raoul says when driving to Las Vegas, “‘Sympathy for the Devil’…was the only tape we had, so we played it constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the radio” (4-5).

Music accompanies the psychedelic experience and drowns out ordinary culture. This is seen most emphatically when Gonzo is in the bath, listening to “White Rabbit” having taken a huge amount of LSD. As he says to Raoul, “Let it roll!... Just as high as the f***er can go! And when it comes to that fantastic note where the rabbit bites its own head off, I want you to throw that f***in radio into the tub with me” (60). For Gonzo, the crescendo of the music is bound up with the crescendo of life and experience itself. This is also the case in a broader cultural sense. The high point of 60s drugs counterculture is associated in the novel with acts like Bob Dylan, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Conversely, the decline of the 60s spirit is mirrored by the subsequent decline or domestication of its music.

Cards, Badges, and Assumed Identities

At the novel’s end, Raoul tries to buy some amyls from an airport pharmacy. He is at first refused by the assistant until he tells her “I’m a doctor” and shows her his “Ecclesiastical Discount Card”. This identifies him “as a Doctor of Divinity, a certified minister of the church of the New Truth” (203). Her attitude then immediately changes, and she runs to get him the drugs. What this shows is how easily people are swayed by socially sanctioned positions of authority. The mere presentation of a card and a title changes him in the woman’s eyes from a “real freak” (203) to a respectable, even attractive, figure. This is despite the drugs being the same and him getting high in front of her.

An even more blatant example of this dynamic emerges when the maid walks into Raoul and Gonzo’s room. She sees the latter naked, vomiting into his shoes, amidst the general filth and chaos of their suite. Nonetheless, Gonzo is able to turn the situation around. This is by, as he explains, “waving the gold Policemen’s Assn. press badge in front of her face” (182). She is then wholly convinced to keep what she has seen a secret. She is also persuaded to work for them as an informer. Thus, the novel satirizes the arbitrariness of established authority and ordinary people’s conditioned fear of it. The average person will believe and do anything for someone who can act the part of an officer convincingly. The same is true of journalists. As Raoul says, “Journalism is not a profession or trade. It is a cheap catch-all for f**koffs and misfits- a false doorway to the backside of life” (200). Yet there are those who believe that by having a plastic “press” card that gives them special authority to talk about what is happening. As with their imitation of the police, the playacting of Raoul as a “Doctor of Journalism” is designed to expose such claims as absurd.

Cars and Road Trips

Having rented the Red Chevrolet convertible to drive across the desert, Raoul comments, “Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars” (18). Thus, he identifies something at the heart of the American psyche. This is the relationship with cars. It is something that goes beyond mere utility. Rather, it is something emotional and even spiritual. Raoul and Gonzo’s cars play a central role in their adventures and are powerful symbols of their “Gonzo” identity and intentions. They spurn safety or efficiency for character. This is seen, for example, when Raoul is driving back from Las Vegas. As he says, “I’d be the most conspicuous thing on this goddamn evil road- the only fire-apple-red shark convertible between Butte and Tijuana” (83). His attachment to the car and the devil-may-care attitude it represents outweigh any concerns about being noticed or caught and instead becomes part of his free-spirited recklessness.

The same is true of road-trips. As Raoul says, their trip to Vegas was “a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character… a gross physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country” (18). In this way, Thompson references a long tradition of epic road journeys in American literature. This dynamic runs through Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959). As in Fear and Loathing, the characters in these novels set out to find something new and essential through their trip. They seek an escape from ossified, stifling, or dying ways of life. Yet as in Fear and Loathing, they become the metaphorical elephants driving into the wilderness. The trips, like for Raoul, end by “a huge slab of cracked, scorched concrete” (168), and whatever it was they were searching for remains perpetually elusive.