Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Major Themes

Major Themes

The preface quotes Samuel Johnson: He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man. The quotation alludes to the protagonists' profuse drug use in escaping the coarse realities of American life; passages detail the failed counterculture, people who thought drug use was the answer to society's problems. The contradiction of solace in excess is thematically similar to The Great Gatsby, a favourite novel of Thompson's.

Thompson posits that his drug use (unlike Timothy Leary's mind-expansion experimentation drug use) is intended to render him a mess; that he is the poster boy of a generation of "permanent cripples, failed seekers...;" their erratic behaviour depicts the restless failure his generation feels.

The "American Dream" is the novel's prevalent thematic motif, while searching for the literary and metaphoric American Dream, and for an eponymous real place in Las Vegas, Duke and Dr Gonzo find only a burned-down nightclub by the name of the Old Psychiatrists Club, and known before that as the American Dream. At story's start, Duke claims their adventure shall be a "gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country", an idea soon cooled when the excess and fear settle in them.

Throughout Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the protagonists go out of their way to degrade, abuse, and destroy symbols of American consumerism and excess, while Las Vegas symbolizes the coarse ugliness of mainstream American culture.