Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

Raoul Duke is the narrator and main protagonist of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Yet in the course of the novel, readers learn almost nothing about him. They are told that he “became a doctor of Gonzo Journalism” (199), and that his job is ostensibly that of a journalist. There are also odd vignettes about his past. For example, there is the story of the first time he took LSD. Then there is story of how he was prevented from getting on a plane in Peru, and that of his neighbor who was arrested for vagrancy. Still, there is very little information about his past, his relationships, or his life. Even his relationship to Gonzo remains obscured by their constant drug taking and the incoherent or warped conversations between them that result.

One way of explaining this absence of conventional characterization is that it is a reflection of, and comment on, the nature of the drug experience itself. Thompson tries to show with Raoul how an ordinary sense of identity can break down under the influence of psychedelics. These leave the contextualizing influence of time behind and thrust one into the immediacy and fascination of the moment.