This semester, I’m teaching an English 1102 course called “Literature on the Drugs.” Since January, my students and I have traced the relationship between literature and narcotics in the modern era from the emergence of recreational drug use at the dawn of the nineteenth century (in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment” and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater ) through the present day. At the center of the novel is a cat and mouse game, the story of a predator hunting its prey–a narrative perhaps no more apparent than in the novel’s geography, scattered along roads much darker than Kerouac’s search for the heart of Saturday night.įigure Ace Books cover of Junky, including the original spelling of the title and Burroughs’s pseudonym, William Lee.

1) in order to emphasize that the book’s protagonist is the drug and not the addict. It was Burroughs’s initial wish that the novel be titled Junk and not Junky (nor Junkie, as it was spelled in the original Ace Books edition, Fig.

From New York to the Federal Narcotics Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, from New Orleans to the Rio Grande Valley, and from Mexico City to Colombia, Burroughs’s reader follows the author’s stand-in, the pseudonymous William Lee, as his addiction chases him further south in search of “the final fix”: yage, a mythical Amazonian cure, said to “increase telepathic sensitivity” (149-50). Part pulp thriller, part anthropological survey of the cultural habits of heroin and its users, published two years after Burroughs killed his wife Joan Vollmer in a drunken game of William Tell (a fact the novel problematically elides), Junky‘s escape narrative is one of endless pursuit. Burroughs’s novel contains no such happy ending. Kerouac’s roman à clef- first mapped by the author himself–ends in what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a “return to the native land” (133): the protagonist Sal Paradise goes to live with his aunt in New York just as Kerouac went to live with his mother in real life, falling in love with a girl in a symbolic re-closing of the American frontier. Burroughs, Junky (1953), is equally expansive in its exploration of the North American continent. While Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) is usually remembered as the quintessential American road novel, the slightly earlier debut novel of Kerouac’s friend and fellow Beat William S.

Junky william s