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
Duke is thinking about his drifter friend as he drives back to the hotel. The drifter’s crime of vagrancy cost him fifty dollars and a week in jail, which makes Duke nervous. “Jesus,” he says, “what kind of incredible penalties will they spew on me?” Duke is sure the law can’t get him for rape, but fraud and larceny? That would be easy enough. He plans to tell the police that Sports Illustrated sent him to Vegas, which will hopefully tie them up in a “nightmare lawsuit” over the $44,066.12 bill Duke and Gonzo have run up in hotel bills and damage.
Duke is incredibly guilty compared to the innocent drifter, so Duke’s punishment is sure to be severe, especially as he doesn’t have any money to save him. Again, Duke refuses to take responsibility for his actions, and plans to dump it on his magazine, which he now directly identifies as Sports Illustrated. The fact that Duke works for a major magazine again implies that he is a serious journalist, but of course his behavior tells a different story.
Themes
It all seems so crazy, “but what is sane,” Duke wonders, especially in this “doomstruck era of Nixon.” People are “all wired into a survival trip now, and they no longer take “the speed that fueled the Sixties.” Drugs like uppers “are going out of style,” Duke says. This is the “fatal flaw in Leary’s trip,” he argues. He sold “consciousness expansion” without thinking about the “grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait.” Leary “blew it badly for himself,” and everyone one else he took “down with him.”
Duke’s reference to Nixon’s presidency as a “doomstruck era” reflects his discontent and resistance to the establishment and formal government. Furthermore, Nixon’s notorious corruption implies that the entire establishment is corrupt as well, which accounts for the “grim meat-hook realities lying in wait” for people passively trying to find “peace” by taking drugs.
Themes
“No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them,” Duke says. Leary led “pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit.” Leary’s failure had created “a generation of permanent cripples” and “failed seekers,” Duke argues, who don’t understand “the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody—or at least some force—is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.”
Here, Duke describes the counterculture as passive observers of their unjust society. They were certainly against the violence and corruption of their government, but they did little beyond voicing their discontent and seeking personal pleasure through drugs. In this way, Duke argues, their failure was deserved and even expected. He also expresses his fundamentally pessimistic and nihilistic worldview here—not only is society hopeless and corrupt, but there is no larger spiritual or moral force protecting anyone.
Themes
The “old-mystic fallacy” is the same “paradoxically benevolent bullshit” peddled by the Catholic Church, Duke says. This assumption and “blind faith” occurred during a “crucial moment” in the Sixties when “the Beatles cast their lot with the Maharishi,” and it continued with the decade’s multiple “gurus,” which then morphed into cults and Charles Manson.
This “blind faith” assumes that there is basic good in the world, but Duke argues otherwise, and suggests that this “faith” also led to the counterculture’s failure. Like with the American Dream, it is impossible to find good if it isn’t there in the first place.
Themes
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Sonny Barger “never quite got the hang of it,” Duke says, and he “blew it in 1965” when the Angels “attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march.” This was the “first open break between the Greasers and Longhairs,” which ended with the destruction of the SDS and their inability to “reconcile the interests of the lower/working class biker/dropout types and upper/middle, Berkeley/student activists.” At the time, no one “could possibly have foreseen the Implications of the Ginsberg/Kesey failure to persuade the Hell’s Angels to join forces with the radical Left from Berkley.”
Sonny Barger is one of the founding members of the Hell’s Angels in Oakland, California, and Duke implies that it was Barger who ordered the Angels to attack the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), a group of student activists protesting the Vietnam War. The students and bikers were both members of the counterculture, and they were fighting amongst each other, all the while ignoring their true enemy—the American establishment. American beat novelists Allen Ginsberg and Ken Kesey were notable leaders of the countercultural movement, but they couldn’t make peace within the movement itself.
Themes
The final break came at Altamont, Duke says, but that “orgy of violence” only “dramatized the problem.” The “reality” is that “the Movement” was doomed to be “terminal,” and “the energies of the Movement” were “aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation.”
The movement ultimately failed, Duke argues, because it was inherently violent, just as American society is. This violence culminated at a music festival at the Altamont Speedway in California, where a concert-goer was stabbed to death. Thompson further implies that society is greedy and self-centered, as Duke claims that the movement’s failure led to a “rush to self-preservation.”
Themes
Back in his room at the Flamingo, Duke feels “dangerously out of phase,” like “something ugly is about to happen.” He looks around the trashed hotel room at the obvious signs of violence and destruction. Gonzo’s bed looks “like a burned-out rat’s nest,” and there are broken shards of glass and mirror everywhere. Thankfully, no maids have entered the room since the “awful confrontation on Tuesday” with Alice from linen service.
The state of Duke’s hotel room reflects the violence that Thompson implies pervades all of society. Gonzo’s bed, “a burned-out rat’s nest,” is the pinnacle of this display. The broken mirror is a particularly powerful image in which their violence has literally smashed the glass
Themes
On Tuesday, Duke and Gonzo had forgotten to hang the “Do Not Disturb” sign, and Alice had wandered in to clean. Gonzo, who was hungover and throwing up into a closet, was startled by her sudden appearance and quickly tackled her and began to choke her. “Please…please…I’m only the maid,” she said with Gonzo’s hands around her throat.
Gonzo’s reaction is another example of violence and his target is again a woman. In this way, Thompson again implies that American society is both a sexist and violent place.
Themes
“You’re under arrest!” Duke suddenly yelled. “No!” cried Alice. “I just wanted to clean up!” Duke asked Alice if she was part of “the dope ring” at the hotel and she began to cry. “I know you’re cops,” she said. “I don’t know anything about dope!” Gonzo agreed to let her go if she would work for them, passing along information about illegal drug activity in the hotel. But, he warned, if she talks to anyone about it, she will “go straight to prison for the rest of [her] life.” She agreed. “Whatever you say, gentlemen,” she said as she backed out the door.
The fact that Alice actually believes Duke and Gonzo are cops is absurd and no doubt intended to be satirical, but Thompson’s point is still clear: law enforcement, and by extension the American government, is violent and corrupt. Alice fully believes that the police would behave so brutally and then threaten her into becoming some kind of criminal informant.
Themes
