38 pages • 1 hour read
William S. BurroughsNaked Lunch
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1959A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Lee
Lee, who we later learn is William Lee, is the narrator and main protagonist of Naked Lunch. Lee’s escape from the police in New York and journey to Interzone forms the narrative basis of the novel. Lee’s drug-inspired visions and descriptions underpin the bizarre events and characters in Interzone and other fantastical places. However, Lee himself is an enigma. We learn at the start that he’s addicted to heroin and is a low-level dealer—and that he may be gay. Beyond that, and the fact that he lives in New York, the narrative reveals little about his background or identity. His acquaintances, besides odd references to people like Eduardo, who “died of an overdose in Madrid” (195), are—like “the Rube” or “the Vigilante”—just as obscure as him. Events or comments in Interzone don’t really help. At one point Lee says, in discussing the political parties of Interzone, that he is “on the Factualist side” (123). This party opposes the attempts to destroy individuality that the other parties favor. We also learn that Lee must go to the County Court House to “file an immediate affidavit that he’s suffering from bubonic plague to avoid eviction” (142).
However, this limited information refers to places and entities that are themselves fantastical and only obliquely to events in the real world, so it gives us little insight into Lee. A more promising line of inquiry relates to his notebooks. Lee saves these from the police, and they seem to be in some form the text of Naked Lunch itself. This is apparent in the “Atrophied Preface” chapter, when Lee states that “I have written many prefaces” (187)—and when he says that he’ll “unlock my word hoard” (192) and proceeds to talk about the nature of addiction. Thus, we can say that on many levels—and as suggested by the name “William”—Lee is an avatar for Burroughs himself. Lee gives voice to Burroughs’s own experiences on drugs and his attempts to escape, both literally and metaphorically, from the staid world of 1950s America. Naked Lunch is a document exploring the process, for Lee and Burroughs, of writing about that escape.
Benway
On one level, Dr. Benway, who has “been assigned” to Lee as he moves toward the fictional worlds of Freeland and Interzone, is a comical and even joyful figure. The narrative demonstrates this in the Interzone hospital, where Benway, performing heart surgery with a toilet plunger, complains to the nurse, “You young squirts couldn’t lance a pimple without an electric vibrating scalpel with automatic drain and suture” (51). He thus satirizes the increasingly technological nature of society and its obsession with hygiene. Likewise, in his experiment on a woman called Iris in Interzone, Benway wishes to test whether “the human body can run on sugar alone” (101). He then fervently denies slipping extra protein and vitamins into her tea. As such, Benway can be seen as satirizing, through exaggeration and strange juxtapositions, our faith in modern medicine and its supposedly benign methods of experimentation.
However, at other times, Benway represents something more sinister. In his “examination” of Carl to ascertain whether he’s gay, Benway seems to lose his earlier playfulness, becoming straightforwardly serious and malevolent. As Carl observes, Benway’s eyes were “without a trace of warmth or hate or any emotion […] at once cold and intense, predatory and impersonal” (158). Here, Benway represents objectifying standards of social conformity and power. He reverts to being the Benway responsible for Annexia and the Reconditioning Center in Freeland. In both instances, Benway uses science and medical experimentation to oppress and control people—most horrifically via the “Switchboard” device, which is designed to test the extent to which human beings can be transformed into “thinking machines” (22) by inflicting intense pain when they make the wrong connection. At the same time, when patients overrun his Reconditioning Center, Benway expresses delight. Thus, he remains an ambiguous figure in Naked Lunch. He’s at once an expression of the social order and sadistic control, and the anarchistic, albeit immoral, subversion of that order.
The Party Leader
Just as Naked Lunch shies away from explicit political commentary, few of the novel’s characters represent any specific, real-world political position. The one exception to this is the leader of the Arab nationalist party, or the “Party Leader.” Although Interzone is fictious and largely reflects the drug-inspired fantasies of Burroughs’s imagination, the writer did live somewhere called the “International Zone” in Tangier, Morocco for a period. As such, Interzone likely incorporates or reflects some elements of Tangier and the “International Zone.” Part of this is the influence of Arab nationalism, to which the Party Leader gives voice. This man claims to speak for “ordinary men and women going about their ordinary everyday tasks” (102). This is in opposition to the French, whom he describes to a boy as “the colonial bastards […] sucking your live corpuscles” (102).
Naked Lunch says little else about the French, although Morocco was a French colony until 1956. As a result, a French presence in Tangier would have been likely while Burroughs stayed there. Regardless, the narrative portrays the Party Leader as self-serving and hypocritical. Despite claiming an affinity with the “ordinary people” of Tangier, he sits literally above them on a balcony, sipping whisky, smoking cigars, and wearing “expensive English shoes” (102). Even worse, he becomes angry when an elderly man is caught under the wheels of his “brand new Buick Roadmaster Convertible” (114). In addition, he tries to orchestrate a riot against the French by using “a thousand bone fed, blue ribbon Latahs from Indochina” (117-18). Latahs are humanoids who compulsively imitate the actions of those around them. The implication is not only that outside forces create the riot but that it results from manipulation and control by the Party. It’s not the product of any authentic or autonomous feeling on the part of the populace; in fact, the local “ordinary” population experiences horrendous pain when the police break the riot, leaving the town square “littered with teeth and sandals and slippery with blood” (121).
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