Naked Lunch Summary

Naked Lunch is a collection of vignettes that are only loosely related to one another, if at all. As the narrator explains in the “Atrophied Preface,” which importantly comes at the end of the book, the novel is meant to be open and read starting at any point.

The first vignette begins with an unnamed narrator throwing a spoon and dropper away into a public trash can and jumping the turnstile at a New York City subway station. He believes he is being followed by narcotics agents. After performing his character of “junky” for a strait-laced subway rider, he gets off the subway, meets up with some of his friends from the street, and they decide to skip town.

The narrator and his co-travelers rent an old car and head west together. They pass through Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Texas, and then Mexico, and the narrator details how he scores drugs along the way. In Mexico, he meets a drug pusher named Lupita who doesn’t use drugs herself but gets high from her proximity to drugs. He also encounters a woman named Jane who is involved with a misogynistic pimp; they all get so high that the narrator panics and runs out into the street.

After describing his adventures in Mexico, the narrator abruptly jumps to his work as an agent for a company called Islam Inc. He has been assigned to recruit a man named Dr. Benway to work for Islam Inc. When the narrator meets Dr. Benway, he is serving as head of the Reconditioning Center in a welfare state called the Freeland Republic. In this role, Dr. Benway claims to use medical experimentation and pharmaceutical products to rehabilitate the so-called deviant citizens of Freeland, but it really seems like he is torturing them. After giving the narrator a tour of the center, Dr. Benway receives learns that all the residents of the Rehabilitation Center have been released due to a technical malfunction. Chaos ensues in Freeland, and Dr. Benway decides on the spot to take the job with Islam Inc. They head to the roof to catch the helicopter out of Freeland and from there observe the mayhem as it unfolds.

The narrative eventually makes it to a place called Interzone, where it follows The Sailor, who works for “Fats” Terminal in the sale of “Black Meat” (the flesh of a giant aquatic black centipede—it is a substance that is so addictive that so-called “Meat Eaters” cycle between eating it and vomiting it until they collapse from exhaustion). The Sailor heads to The Meet Café where a Mugwump provides him with the product. (Mugwumps are grotesque creatures who emit an addictive fluid from their penises. Those addicted to the Mugwumps’ fluid are referred to as Reptiles.)

The next vignette takes place in the hospital where the narrator, identified now as Willy The Agent, is being treated for drug addiction. Over the course of treatment, Willy The Agent hallucinates on several occasions. He imagines Dr. Benway operating on an unknown woman in the hospital lavatory, as well as a prime-time television program in which a character called The Tenor sings the while another called The Diplomat delivers a patriotic speech. The scene ends with The Diplomat dying on stage from what appears to be a heart attack and an explosion in The Technician’s control room. These hallucinations are interspersed with Willy The Agent’s reflections on his own addiction, including the relationship between addiction, shame, and libido. Willy The Agent also imagines that The President is an “Oblique Addict” who gets his drug fix through erotic physical contact with Willy himself.

Later, the narrator, who is now referred to as Lee, is back in his apartment with his old friend, Miguel. Miguel has just returned from two months in Corsica getting clean. Lee offers Miguel heroin, which Miguel accepts, then he abruptly kicks Miguel out of his apartment and goes to find an old colleague named NG Joe. NG Joe is also addicted to drugs, and his addiction started when he came down with a condition called Bang-Utot, in which individuals fear they will be killed by their own sexual organs.

The narrative then returns to Interzone and to Hassan’s “rumpus room,” where a violent and disturbing orgy takes place. (Hassan also works for Islam Inc.) The orgy involves a group hanging event and ends when a fellow agent for Islam Inc. named A.J. attempts to decapitate a hoard of lustful American women. Later, A.J. hosts a party during which he shows a graphic pornographic film involving Johnny, Mary, and Mark. A man known as The Beagle shoots up heroin during the film and experiences several disturbing hallucinations, including some that involve the people in the film.

The narrator then describes the innerworkings of Islam Inc. A.J. is an agent like the narrator, but he also finances the enterprise. Hassan, who made his money in the black-market trade of “slunks” (calves who are too young to be sold as veal), plays an advisory role. Two other members of Islam Inc. are Clem and Jody, former vaudeville performers who claim to be Russian agents working to ruin the U.S.’s reputation abroad. A.J. claims to be “independent,” but the narrator doubts this. The narrator also admits that he is not exactly sure what Islam Inc.’s true objectives are, and he suspects that Hassan uses his work with Islam Inc. to hide his political activities.

Hassan is a member of the Liquefactionist party in Interzone, though the narrator also suspects he may secretly be a Sender. There are several political parties in Interzone: the Liquefactionists’ goal is to absorption of the entire population into one entity. Senders use one-way telepathic communication in an effort to control the population’s thoughts and feelings. Divisionists literally replicate themselves, a process that, if left unhindered, will result in the replication of one individual with millions of separate replicas. And the Factualists, the party to which the narrator belongs, oppose all the other parties. As the narrator points out, the specificities of each group are not important; these differences simply serve to hide the fact that what each is really after is control.

From here, the narrative abruptly jump to the County Clerk, who works in the Old Court House right outside of Interzone. The Court House is notoriously disorganized, so most people avoid going there. But Lee is at risk of being evicted and so must try to get the County Clerk’s help. The County Clerk is in the middle of a racist and misogynistic story when Lee enters the clerk’s office. Lee eventually gets his attention and earns his respect by making an antisemitic and bigoted comment to prove they are part of the same group.

The following vignette depicts the chaotic business dealings of Marvie, Leif the Unlucky, and The Expeditor. Marvie and Leif run a company called Interzone Imports Unlimited, and they are trying to transport a shipment of sexual lubricant made of whale dreck (the waste product left over after whale flesh is processed). They have yet to pay The Expeditor for the work he’s done as part of this deal, and when he confronts them about this, they insult him, causing him to go insane.

The narrative then jumps to Dr. Benway’s interactions with a Freeland resident named Carl Peterson as part of his work with the Ministry of Mental Hygiene and Prophylaxis. Dr. Benway suspects Carl of being homosexual and forces him to prove otherwise by engaging in a series of psychological tests.

Then, the narrative follows The Sailor as he strikes a drug deal with a young man dealing with “coke bugs” (tactile hallucinations that can occur with heavy cocaine use). The young man first tasted narcotics when he was hospitalized as a teenager after a fireworks incident on the Fourth of July. The Sailor tells the young man he can get him his fix, and all he asks in exchange is the man’s “Time,” which, it turns out, is code for sex. He takes the young man to his apartment, which is very clean and free of roaches—a quality the Sailor attributes to the skillful work of the Exterminator. He then gives the young man his first shot of heroin, telling the young man that there is now no going back to other drugs. At the end of the vignette, the narrator reintroduces himself as The Expeditor. He explains that he is trying to sniff out the agents who have potentially defected.

In the next vignette, Lee is back in New York. Two narcotics officers named Hauser and O’Brien have been instructed to pick him up in his apartment and confiscate any text they find, whether written or typed. When the officers arrive at Lee’s apartment, he is about to take his morning shot of drugs. He convinces the officers to let him have one last hit and then fatally shoots both officers. Realizing he must now flee for his life, Lee can only think about where his next drug fix will come from. He contacts a drug pusher named Nick, purchases some heroin, and hides out in a gay bath house overnight. The next morning, Lee sees that there is no news of the double homicide of narcotics officers in the paper, and when he calls the police office to speak to the two officers, the person on the end of the line says there is no one by those names. Lee then realizes that much like the two officers he just killed, he has been shut out of spacetime.

The narrative ends with the “Atrophied Preface,” in which Burroughs (or a fictionalized version of Burroughs) addresses the reader as the author “I, William Seward” and explains his reason for writing Naked Lunch. As a writer, he is more concerned with recording a sensory experience at a particular moment in time than with crafting a plot that makes sense narratively. He tells the reader that Naked Lunch is meant to be a “blueprint” for experiencing heightened levels of experience. And to be successful in this endeavor, the reader must approach the book in absolute silence.