Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

When Raoul picks up a hitchhiker and tells him that “we’re on our way to Las Vegas to find the American Dream” (6), this appears to be a joke. Alternatively, it could be seen as a bizarre, drug-influenced way of finding common ground with the new passenger. There seems to be little tying Raoul and Gonzo’s bizarre journey to the former ideal. This notion, explored many times in American literature, is that one can achieve social and economic success through hard work, virtue, and initiative, regardless of background. Raoul and Gonzo seemingly represent the antithesis of this. They scarcely work in any conventional sense, instead spending most of their time ingesting drugs and alcohol. They also show no interest in the “rewards” of the American Dream. Material wealth and property, beyond what they need for immediate consumption, is irrelevant to them. The duo also has little interest in the related “reward” of social acknowledgement, respect, and status. They continually flout the rules of acceptable behavior, inviting opprobrium and exclusion. For example, this is seen at the turnstile for the Circus-Circus when, having taken ether, both Raoul and Gonzo “behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel” (45), losing all motor skills and banging into everything.

Furthermore, the connection looks to be disproven early on by events in Las Vegas. As Raoul says about the Mint 400 race, “It was like trying to keep track of a swimming meet in an Olympic-sized pool filled with talcum powder instead of water” (38). The dust created by the participants makes it impossible to see who is winning. Thus, the race serves as a metaphor for the American Dream and competition. The competitive striving held up as an ideal counts for little and cannot even be observed. It is a thankless, masochistic, act of faith. This is seen in the description of the race as “an Endurance Contest” (38), where each new driver inflicts on themselves “another brutal hour of kidney-killing madness in that terrible dust-blind limbo” (38). Likewise with gambling. Las Vegas holds open its own take on the American Dream: that anyone can “make it rich” provided they have the necessary skill and luck. This too proves to be an illusion. Raoul tells the story of a friend who initially won $15,000 in a casino and decided to stop gambling. The casino then invited him back as a special guest for a weekend, flying him in with a private plane and leaving him, afterward, $30,000 in debt. In the end, the house always wins. And the game of “fair competition,” like “free enterprise” (12), is ultimately always rigged.

However, this is only one take on the American Dream, or on the American ideal. This is the conventional, materialistic one of individual success via the protestant work ethic. Gonzo and Raoul are searching for something different. As Raoul says, their trip was “a classic affirmation of everything right and true and decent in the national character. It was a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country” (18). The American Dream they are pursuing is that of beat writers Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg. It is the ideal of the pioneers who first explored the American West and America itself. Namely, it is the dream of pushing physical, artistic, and existential boundaries. Relatedly, it is also the dream of creating one’s own story and narrative. As Raoul says about his instructions to “cover the story,” “What was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own" (12). Instead of accepting pre-established narratives about how the world is, they forge their own. And instead of passively observing or describing the world, they become active protagonists in it, pushing or tricking their way into situations and altering them. This is the principle which lies at the heart of what Thompson refers to as “Gonzo journalism” (12).

It is also why drugs play a key role in this version of the American Dream. Drugs, especially hallucinogens like LSD and mescaline, allow Raoul and Gonzo to push the boundaries of what is physically and psychologically possible. Drugs help create for them new and extreme situations. This operates in two ways: First, their altered states thrust them into exceptional and dangerous relations with others and the world. This is evidenced when they drive through the desert or try to check into a hotel while in the middle of an acid trip. Second, psychedelic drugs impose an extreme subjectivity on experience. The emotions and feelings of the user become deeply enmeshed with perceptions of reality. This is seen when Raoul perceives giant lizards biting each other in the hotel lobby or two women sleeping with a polar bear in a bar. In other words, drugs become part of an extreme way to make one’s own reality and story out of a situation. And Las Vegas, a city built on fantasies, seems to be the perfect place to explore this.