Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
American Culture and Counterculture
The American Dream
Drugs and American Society
News and Journalism
Violence
Summary
Analysis
In the meantime, Duke and Gonzo have run up an insanely high room service bill. Over the course of the last forty-eight hours, they have been “running somewhere between $29 and $36 dollars per hour.” Gonzo “senses trouble” and decides to flee. He calls down to room service and orders a “set of fine cowhide luggage” and borrows $25 from Duke for a plane ticket.
This speaks to Gonzo’s ridiculous anti-establishment character. He is supposed to be Duke’s lawyer, but he runs at the first sign of legal trouble. He then adds to the debt, and therefore the legal trouble, when he orders luggage before leaving. He even must borrow money from Duke to do it.
Themes
After Duke drives Gonzo to the airport, he is left alone, “completely twisted on drugs, no attorney, no cash, no story for the magazine—and on top of everything else [he] has a gigantic goddamn hotel bill to deal with.” They had ordered everything under the sun, including “about six hundred bars of translucent Neutrogena soap.”
This passage is also a nod to capitalistic excess. Duke has six hundred bars of soap for no reason other than that he can have six hundred bars of soap. He doesn’t need the soap, but the soap does suggest that his behavior is dirty, or immoral, and therefore needs to be cleansed or purified.
Themes
“How would Horatio Alger handle this,” Duke wonders and begins to “panic.” He packs everything, including the soap, into the Great Red Shark and plans his escape. He notices Gonzo’s .357 Magnum sitting on the front seat of the car. Great, Duke thinks. If he’s caught with the gun, he is going to jail for sure. But he doesn’t want to throw it away—a “good .357 is a hard thing to get, these days”—so he decides to keep it. “My risk—my gun,” Duke reasons.
The image of all that soap loaded into the Great Red Shark, the symbol of capitalism and the American Dream, emphasizes the “dirtiness” of excess and greed. The fact that Duke keeps the gun again suggests that he expects trouble and violence, or even wants to be violent just for entertainment.
Themes
As Duke waits for the perfect time to “slip the noose,” he tries to act casual and read the newspaper. The lead story is about the heroin overdose of a pretty young girl, and a few stories down is a similar story about the drug-related deaths of American soldiers. Inside the paper is another story about a recent congressional hearing in which the military was questioned for “routinely” killing Vietnamese prisoners. The Army defended their actions, claiming one murdered prisoner “was just a slope, anyway.”
As a reflection of society, the news is equally violent and depressing. Duke later points out the national shift from psychedelic drugs to much harder drugs like heroin, and the news stories reflect this tragedy. Furthermore, the news bolsters and reinforces notions of white superiority—the white soldiers defend their brutal actions based on the race of their victims.
Themes
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Reading the paper makes Duke “feel a lot better.” By comparison, his “crimes are pale and meaningless.” Duke claims that he is “a relatively respectable citizen—a multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous,” and that should count for something. But maybe not, he thinks. After all, Muhammad Ali has just “been sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to kill ‘slopes,’” Duke says. “Five years.”
Here, Duke argues that the corrupt nature of the government excuses and even encourages violence and crime. Ali is punished for a peaceful act while the government openly encourages the killing of the enemy, which in this case is perceived as the Vietnamese. Notably, Ali was a black man and the Vietnamese are not white either, which again underscores the racism in American society.
Themes
