Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

by

Hunter S. Thompson

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Themes and Colors
American Culture and Counterculture Theme Icon
The American Dream Theme Icon
Drugs and American Society  Theme Icon
News and Journalism Theme Icon
Violence Theme Icon
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.
Violence Theme Icon

Violence is everywhere in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. As Duke and Dr. Gonzo travel to Las Vegas in a drug-fueled search for the American Dream, they both engage in violent behavior and see violence reflected in the world around them. Television and newspapers are filled with the violence of the Vietnam War, and the people on the streets of Vegas and Hollywood are no different. Duke and Dr. Gonzo intimidate an innocent hitchhiker with the mere implication of violence, and Dr. Gonzo threatens tourists from Oklahoma simply because they look boring, like “they’d just beaten Caesar’s Palace for about $33 at the blackjack tables, and now they were headed for the Circus-Circus to whoop it up. . . .” Violence in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is often unnecessary, excessive, and “savage,” and it is impossible to ignore. Thompson depicts a brutal American society in which violence is tolerated and even encouraged, and by proxy he implies that actual society is just as violent—a precedent, he argues, that is ultimately set by the American government itself.

Each of the central characters in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas displays a baseline level of violence that is almost always a disproportionate response to some perceived threat or circumstance. After Duke and Dr. Gonzo pick up the hitchhiker on their way to Vegas, Duke begins to worry that the hitchhiker knows they are completely high on drugs. “If so—well, we’ll just have to cut his head off and bury him somewhere,” Duke says. “Because it goes without saying that we can’t cut him loose. He’ll report us at once to some kind of outback nazi law enforcement agency, and they’ll run us down like dogs.” Duke isn’t actually sure if he has said this aloud, but Thompson’s point is clear; Duke’s first impulse is needless violence, and he would rather murder the innocent hitchhiker than risk a run-in with the law. Dr. Gonzo is likewise violent, and his most brutally violent moment comes when he is caught off-guard by Alice, a hotel maid, while hungover and throwing up into a closet. When Alice enters the room to clean, Dr. Gonzo body slams the woman and chokes her as she begs for her life. “She was holding that mop like an axe-handle,” Gonzo later tells Duke. “So I came out of the closet in a kind of running crouch, still vomiting, and hit her right at the knees…it was pure instinct; I thought she was ready to kill me.” Gonzo knows his reaction to the maid was ridiculous, but he is so inherently violent that his “instinct” upon seeing an unexpected middle-aged woman is to strike and strangle her.

Thompson twice mentions Lieutenant Calley, an American soldier who was charged with the murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War. Calley allegedly opened fire on a small village in Vietnam, and several solders under his command followed suit. Thompson’s references to Calley highlight the violence present in society during the 1970s. After Calley’s court martial, President Nixon ordered his release from prison and a federal judge ultimately dismissed his conviction. The American public agreed overwhelmingly that while Calley certainly killed innocent people, he was simply following orders, and they too excused this dark stain on American history. By drawing so much attention to the true case of Lieutenant Calley, Thompson clearly wants readers to ruminate on the implications of this violent event. As Duke and Dr. Gonzo drive to Las Vegas, Duke hears “The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley” on the radio, a Billboard Hot 100 hit and the heroic depiction of Calley’s crime in Vietnam. “Great God!” Duke yells as the song begins to play. “What is this terrible music?” Duke’s outburst underscores Calley’s violent crime, as well as the fact that America has glorified this violence in song. Duke later invents a story in which he is stuck in the desert and a strange man approaches him with a menacing knife. Duke fears the man will kill him, but he only wants to “carve a big X in [Duke’s] forehead, in memory of Lieutenant Calley.” Duke’s bizarre story makes little sense, but the strange man’s purpose is unmistakable—he wants to honor Calley, and that honor takes a form that has almost biblical connotations and is reminiscent of the cross marked on a worshiper’s forehead during the Christian celebration of Lent.

Thompson juxtaposes the tragedy of Calley’s alleged violence against the criminal conviction of Muhammed Ali, who Duke notes has recently “been sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to kill” people in Vietnam. Ali, a prominent boxer in America during the 1960s and ‘70s, was an adamant objector to the Vietnam War, and he famously refused to travel across the world in order to kill people he had never met. The comparison of Calley to Ali implies that the American government and greater society condone and even reward violence—after all, Calley has a song dedicated to him—while attempts for peace are met with scorn and punishment. In this vein, Thompson suggests that violence is a given in American society, and each of his characters embodies this notion.

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Violence Quotes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Below you will find the important quotes in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas related to the theme of Violence.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Quotes

Reading the front page made me feel a lot better. Against that heinous background, my crimes were pale and meaningless. I was a relatively respectable citizen—a multiple felon, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous. And when the Great Scorer came to write against my name, that would surely make a difference.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker)
Page Number: 74
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 7 Quotes

“Hell, in Malibu alone, these goddamn Satan-worshippers kill six or eight people every day.” He paused to sip his drink. “And all they want is the blood,” he continued. “They’ll take people right off the street if they have to.” He nodded. “Hell, yes. Just the other day we had a case where they grabbed a girl right out of a McDonald’s hamburger stand. She was a waitress. About sixteen years old . . . with a lot of people watching, too!” “What happened?” said our friend. “What did they do to her?” He seemed very agitated by what he was hearing. "Do?" said my attorney. “Jesus Christ man. They chopped her goddamn head off right there in the parking lot! Then they cut all kinds of holes in her and sucked out the blood.”

Related Characters: Dr. Gonzo (speaker), Raoul Duke, The Georgia Cop
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 11 Quotes

Sonny Barger never quite got the hang of it, but he’ll never know how close he was to a king-hell breakthrough. The Angels blew it in 1965, at the Oakland-Berkeley line, when they acted on Barger’s hardhat, con-boss instincts and attacked the front ranks of an anti-war march. This proved to be an historic schism in the then Rising Tide of the Youth Movement of the Sixties. It was the first open break between the Greasers and the Longhairs, and the importance of that break can be read in the history of SDS, which eventually destroyed itself in the doomed effort to reconcile the interests of the lower/working class biker/dropout types and the upper/middle, Berkeley/student activists.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker)
Page Number: Book Page 179
Explanation and Analysis:

Nobody involved in that scene, at the time, 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 Berkeley. The final split came at Altamont, four years later, but by that time it had long been clear to everybody except a handful of rock industry dopers and the national press. The orgy of violence at Altamont merely dramatized the problem. The realities were already fixed; the illness was understood to be terminal, and the energies of The Movement were long since aggressively dissipated by the rush to self-preservation.

Related Characters: Raoul Duke (speaker)
Page Number: Book Page 179-80
Explanation and Analysis: