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Popular Culture Review
actions are aimed to uncover the larger truth of his assigned story which he hopes
will be the larger truth of American culture, symbolized by the American Dream.
Duke’s gradual obsession to discover the American Dream leads him (and his
attorney, Dr. Gonzo) to abandon Duke’s second assignment of covering the
Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Conference. He monomaniacally pursues the verbal
“truth” of the American Dream just as the gamblers monomanically pursue the
monetary “truth” of the American Dream. Duke’s dissatisfaction with his job as
journalist is apparent in the way he avoids his reporting assignments. He skirts
what he considers to be the superficialities of journalism in favor of the core of
American stoiytelling itself: expressing the American Dream. As such, he is like
the ubiquitous American novelist trying to write the Great American Novel which
has become impossible in a fragmented, postmodern world.
In reality, Duke’s version of the American Dream is literally an escape
from geographical, epistemological and psychological reality into a fictionalized,
perverted state brought on during his drug-induced revelations and hallucinations.
His American Dream is the constant possibility of escape and transformation, which
is essentially a postmodern notion of a fluid psychological self that can be changed
or de ranged at will. Indeed, in Duke’s words: “Every now and then when your life
gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on
heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas”( 12).
This may be a postmodern parody of Melville’s prototypical American every-man,
Ishmael, who proclaims at the beginning of Moby Dick that whenever he feels
gloomy, macabre, and vindictive, whenever it is a “damp, drizzly November” (21)
in his soul, he accounts it high time to get to sea as soon as he can. But whereas
Ishmael seeks only to diminish his melancholia, Duke seeks to amplify his perverted
identity and/or nullify his previous identity. Duke’s drug taking allows him to
manipulate his moods and identity at will. His identity is ultimately as amorphous
and hyper-real as that of postmodern noir society.
The noir hero is typically threatened by external social disillusion or
collapse, whereas Raoul Duke in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is threatened by
internal psychological disillusion or collapse. Duke literally plunges into the
underworld of his own psyche just as the earlier noir hero plunges into the
underworld of urban society. However, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, there
seems to be a relationship between social and personal degeneracy. In a truly
postmodern vein, the distinction between the external social world and the internal
psychological world is blurred. It is unclear whether Duke produces social “reality”
or whether social “reality” produces his own psychological identity. Ironically, it
is through Duke’s psychological derangement produced by his prodigious drug
taking that he becomes privy to the social degeneracy in American culture. Still,
we cannot be certain to trust Duke’s drug-induced chimeras because they may be