Naked Lunch

When Lee awakes, “back from the dead” (195), at the novel’s end, after almost dying from an overdose, he describes a “white flash” and “mangled insect screams” (195). In this way, he repeats a motif that occurs throughout Naked Lunch—namely, the attribution of an insect or insectoid quality to a human being. For example, a group of hipsters have “faces blank with an insect’s unseeing calm” (89). Lee often refers to “Black insect lusts” (187). More disturbingly, human pain ostensibly becomes “insect pain.” When a group of children tie a brain-dead heroin user to a post and light a fire between his thighs, Lee says that “his flesh jerks in the fire with insect agony” (22). The insectoid quality of his pain thus symbolizes the user ceasing to be fully human.

This idea repeats when Schafer’s lobotomized test subject turns into “a monster black centipede” (87). Further, as evident when the audience declares the centipede non-human, drug use cuts off from other humans. Not only do users lose a sense of their own humanity and the ability to communicate with others, but others no longer understand them. Their existence, their desires, and their pain, though real, are seen as instinctive or mechanical reactions to stimuli, as in the “jerking” of the tied-up user’s flesh. This is also evident in Benway’s “demonstration” to Lee of one of his subjects who has irreversible neural damage. He says, “They still have reflexes” (28) before holding a bar of chocolate in front of the man, whereupon “[t]he man sniffs. His jaws begin to work. He makes snatching motions with his hands. Saliva drips from his mouth” (28). His being, like that of an insect, while still technically alive, consists merely of automated biological responses. Passing out of the category of human, he’s no longer capable of eliciting either our understanding or our sympathy.