"Kill the Body, and Head wil Die"

I enjoyed reading, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S Thompson.  I have read parts of it before and was not thrilled by it.  The background on the literary style helped me to appreciate it this time.  Thompson's candid style of recording all of his experiences was refreshing.  It felt like he wrote without an audience in mind.  But from his own passion about the loss of the American dream. His drug use in the story is over the top which suggests to me that its not about consciousness expanding but escape.  He does not want to expand his mind but escape from the reality of world as he views it.  He says, "Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can." (Thompson 1)  He is disillusioned by the loss of the ideas of the 1960's.  The new decade seems to hold no promise for him.  He writes about the sixties in a very forlorn way, "...But that was some other era, burned out and long gone from the brutish realities of this foul year of Our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and Seventy One.  A lot of things had changed in those years." (Thompson 12)  Thompson's view of the American dream seems to have vanished in the haze.  Was the dream gone? Why go to Las Vegas to look for the American dream when it is the city of make believe?

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Fear and Loathing

As I read the bio of Thompson I was amazed  of his articles that he wrote.  After reading about his life as a young child and how he  was raised as a kid.  His father deceased and his mother was an alcoholic.  As from my understanding of this reading he did use drugs and was in a gang or a gangster as they called it back in the day.  This caused him to go to jail because of all the things he did and the trouble he was in.  So that lead him to enlist in the military.  The dialog that he used in this article is all on what he thought and how he explained it.  But as I read it I still didn't think this was him being a bad boy or a good boy during this fear or loathing.  Then as you read this you will see that his lawyer was with him at all times.  So was the lawyer his protection or was he there as his partner of crime?  This could have been something that was made up.  The boy that they had with them was someone that they picked up along the way. Amazing how he traveled with drugs, weapons, and alcohol and firearms across country and he was never cult.  How would you really take this story, when I read the next segment I hope to have a better understanding.

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