Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas . Tom Wolfe called Hunter Thompson the great comedic writer of the 20th Century
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
If there’s a story that I wish we had read during the course of the semester it would be from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter Thompson. I believe that the class missed out on what would have a very entertaining reading. My T.A., Sara Phifer, told our discussion section that Thompson was heavily and directly influenced by Allen Ginsburg and the beat style. I told her that it wasn’t too much of a stretch for me to believe but the main difference to me was that Thompson was actually funny.
Tom Wolfe called Hunter Thompson “the great comedic writer of the 20th Century” and considered him “as being in the tradition of Mark Twain.” Like Ginsburg, Thompson’s style was unique and his characters seemed to come from another world. The imagination and creativity that Thompson possessed is truly something to behold. From the very first line in the Norton Anthology the reader is introduced to a world being described as “The Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing on Saturday if the Nazi’s had won the war. This is the Sixth Reich” (E 2492). Immediately wondering what in the world is going on, the reader is transferred to an existence that is real but part imaginary as well. It’s an alternative existence to be sure. The narrator is observing “the gambling tables the Forty Flying Carazito Brothers are doing a high-wire trapeze act, along with four muzzled Wolverines and the Six Nymphet Sisters from San Diego” (E 2492). If things couldn’t get more bizarre “right smack above your head is a half-naked fourteen year-old girl being chased through the air by a snaring wolverine, which is locked in a death battle with two silver-painted Polacks who come swinging down from the opposite balconies and meet mid-air on the wolverine’s neck” (E2492-2493). It ends when “the Polacks seize the animal as they fall straight down towards the crap tables” (E 2493).