Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (book)

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream is a novel by Hunter S. Thompson, illustrated by Ralph Steadman. The story follows its protagonist, Raoul Duke, and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo, as they descend on Las Vegas to chase the American Dream through a drug-induced haze. The novel first appeared as a two-part series in Rolling Stone magazine in 1971.

Plot

Journalist Raoul Duke and attorney Dr. Gonzo travel from Los Angeles, California to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1971 to cover a motorcycle race for a sports magazine and enjoy a haphazardly planned vacation. The vacation turns highly irresponsible and reckless as the two consume copious amounts of illegal drugs, commit various acts of fraud, and generally reap mayhem upon the citizens of Las Vegas.

Set in Las Vegas (a symbol of both American consumerism and tourism) during the height of the Vietnam War and the closing of the 1960s counter-cultural movement, Duke and Gonzo find themselves as outsiders in a unique position to analyze the present state of America and chase down the “American Dream”.

Origins

The book is largely a fictionalized account of Thompson and attorney Oscar Zeta Acosta's actual trip to Las Vegas around the same time period. In real life, Thompson was to cover the Mint 400 motocross race for Sports Illustrated magazine in 1971, for which he was contracted to write photo captions. Coincidentally, he was also commissioned to cover a Las Vegas law enforcement narcotics convention for Rolling Stone magazine.

Before being asked to cover the race, Thompson was in Los Angeles, reporting on the murder of Reuben Salazar and the race riots that resulted from his death. Acosta was a prominent figure in the Chicano community and therefore a natural source for Thompson's story. Finding it difficult for a Hispanic to talk openly to a white reporter in L.A.'s tense atmosphere, Thompson and Acosta decided that Las Vegas would be a more comfortable place to work on the story. Thompson later wrote the majority of Fear and Loathing in a hotel room in Arcadia, California during his spare time while he finished writing the Salazar story for Rolling Stone (later published as Strange Rumblings in Aztlan) ^*.

What was intended as a 250-word photo-captioning job/road trip snowballed into a novel-length feature for Rolling Stone magazine in November 1971. The text was eventually published as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The novel was heralded as the "best book on the dope decade" by the New York Times and a "scorching epochal sensation" by author Tom Wolfe.

In the book The Great Shark Hunt, Thompson refers to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as "a failed experiment in gonzo journalism," a guerrilla style of reporting that Thompson championed and publicized throughout his career. Allegedly based on William Faulkner's idea that "the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism — and the best journalists know this," it blends storytelling, fiction, and traditional journalism.

As is true with most of Thompson’s writing, most of the book is based on actual events although the details are altered to such a degree that the work can easily be considered fiction. For example, the novel describes Duke attending both the motorcycle race and the narcotics convention within a few days time. In real life, both events did indeed take place in Las Vegas in 1971, although they took place over a month apart. ^*. The timeline (and possibly attendance) of events was thus fictionalized to (presumably) avoid compromising the frenzied pace of the novel.

Themes

The book was an attempt to place the radical activism and drug culture of the 1960s into the context of what was the mainstream American experience at the time. It explores the idea that 1971 was a turning point in hippie and drug culture in America, when the countercultural movement no longer had momentum and its innocence and optimism of the late 1960s turned to cynicism.

Throughout the novel, the main characters go out of their way to degrade, abuse, and destroy symbols of American consumerism and excess. Much of Las Vegas is used to symbolize the ugliness of mainstream American culture, to which the characters give little respect. In the DVD commentary of his film version of the novel, Director Terry Gilliam characterizes these actions as a theme of anarchism.

Some have suggested that the book's themes resemble those of The Great Gatsby, which deals with the state of the American Dream and the lives of the rich and careless. Others have surmised that the white Cadillac the pair drive (referred to as the "White Whale" in the book) is an allusion to the white whale in Moby Dick, symbolically representative of good and evil and a metaphor for elements of life that are out of people's control.

The "wave speech"

The "wave speech" is an important passage that appears late in the novel. Thompson considered the "wave speech" to be "probably the finest thing I've ever written." The wave speech describes in retrospect the summer of love and regards 1971 as a turning point in the hippie sub-culture. "There was no point in fighting -- on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark -- the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

ISBNs

ISBN 0679785892 (paperback, 1999)
ISBN 0679602984

External links