Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 75

A Countercultural Gatsby

67

Bay, then up to the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda.
. . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal
sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory
over the forces of Old and E v il.. . . Our energy would simply prevail.
There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the
momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful w ave...
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in
Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can
almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally
broke and rolled back. (67-69)
Duke’s insightful summation of his take on the Psychedelic Age manages, in
simple, eloquent language, to capture the spirit of possibility that marked the 1960s.
Fifty years earlier, F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing about the ultimately false sense of
possibility and hope that marked the Jazz Age, accomplished the same thing in
The Great Gatsby. That Fear and Loathing and Gatsby are in some ways remarkably
similar is not as strange as it may initially sound, for the Jazz Age and the so-called
Psychedelic Age were not that different in spirit. Both Fitzgerald and Thompson,
each an avowed chronicler of his respective age, believed, at one time, in the
possibilities of America, and as they aged both men became increasingly
disillusioned. As Jerome Whitehead notes:
...The periods and settings of the books correspond—the Jazz Age
and the Psychedelic Age, the newly-rich estates of Long Island and
the gaming rooms of Las Vegas. Further, the books take up the same
theme, what’s known grandly as The American Dream or prosaically
as the sense of possibility. With a jackpot to fill your pocket and a few
tabs of acid to expand your mind, all things can seem possible to you,
just as sharply and vainly as they did to Gatsby. (71)
By the novel’s end, Duke comes to a realization similar to Nick Carraway’s at

Gatsby s end. He realizes that his belief in possibility was merely illusory faith in
a false myth. He and Dr. Gonzo tried to lay a 60s “trip” on the 70s, but their
attempt didn’t work because the idealism of the sixties was long dead. As Thompson
has written, Fear and Loathing is “a vile epitaph for the Drug Culture of the Sixties”
(Shark Hunt 124). Whereas towards the end of the first part of Fear and Loathing
Duke remembers the “wave” of the sixties and imagines that he can see the “high
water mark” where the wave finally broke, at the end of the second part of the
book, Duke contemplates the breaking of that “wave,” which he believes resulted