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24. Atrophied Preface
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Naked Lunch, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Drug Addiction
The Art of Writing
Politics, Power, and Control
American Society
The Medical-Industrial Complex
Summary
Analysis
The chapter reads like a surrealist poem and presents a series of seemingly unfinished sentences that nevertheless present graphic imagery. The narrator can taste metal in his mouth after waking up “from the dead” (likely referring to a drug overdose). He describes something “trailing the colorless smell of death.” A man named Eduardo overdoses and dies in Madrid. Trains burn through flesh; orgasms flash like the camera does when it takes “photos of arrested motion.” Someone requests “no more,” but Lee says “yes.” A man with a Chinese accents tells another person to come back on Friday (a reprise from earlier in the novel). It is signed “Tangier, 1959.”
The disjointed phrases that comprise the novel’s final chapter have seemingly nothing in common aside from the horrifying nature of the images they depict. One interpretation is as an example of the “word horde” Burroughs evokes in the Atrophied Preface. Yet the fact that the scenes are so short, and thus the transitions between them rapid, also evokes what happens when a train passes and the loud sound kind of undulates as each of the train cars pass (and indeed this series of images does mention a train). In this regard, the passage seems to mirror the rapid and intense impact drugs have as they enter the system and stimulate the generation of images in brain.
Active
Themes
