Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Аннотация:
There is far more to "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" than most people think. It is not "about" drugs. It is not about road trips or any of that rubbish... It is in fact a modern Gatsby. "The Great Gatsby" is one of the greatest novels of the century, and Thompson was well aware of Fitzgerald's masterpiece. Both novels deal with that particular characteristic of the American mindset summed up in the phrase "the American Dream"... this is characterised by two things: (1) a belief in agency, or the power of the individual to shape his or her own life and (2) a disregard for the past in preference of the future. Jay Gatsby embodied agency in the sense that he invented himself, and he showed his disregard for the past because he spent all his time trying to get Daisy to return to a time before she met Tom. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" is just as complex as Gatsby though there isn't space to properly go into it here... But, for starters: Has anyone else noticed that the first half of the novel is almost exactly the same as the second half? they are structurally identical. the hitch-hiker is replaced by Lucy, one hotel is replaced by another, one car by another, etc. This is not necessarily Thompson's laziness... the past repeating itself is a recurrent theme (is Bush the Nixon of our generation? different?). Thompson is smarter than most people give him credit for and if you want to get anything "solid" from this book then you should try to engage with it on an intelligent level... Thompson's/Duke's actions represent the amazing possibilities which lie at the heart of the American Dream... "but only for those with true grit" ... Thompson makes the seventies a failure of the sixties... Additional: his recent work may be sub-par (or comparatively so) but buy his volumes of collected letters; they show a man who gets enormous joy from real writing (spending a lot of time getting the words "just so" - this is the mark of a real writer...).