Neat! I’m reading it for the first time right now.
I can usually tear through books in a sitting or two, even ones I don’t exactly like. Naked Lunch is different; I’m having to read it a few pages at a time here and there. About halfway through at this point.
So far, there doesn’t seem to be a plot; I’d say it’s more a string of loosely connected events, a stream of consciousness, or a series of images. The imagery is hard to describe. Most of the episodes are about sex and drugs. Usually, when we think of those two things, we imagine getting some sort of pleasure out of it, even if it’s a guilty pleasure. There’s none of that here. It’s all things like the hunt to find a usable vein, deviant sex acts, body fluids, the sickness of drug addicts, different kinds of drugs, dirty city streets, and violence- but told through the eyes of someone who is really, really fucking high, so there is a constant thread of very inventive trippyness and departures from reality.
As far as there being no narrative- it goes past that. Burroughs plays with language, like inventing slang and then defining it (like in the SNL sketches with Stefon where he says “It’s that thing where…” I love those) or repeating the same phrase in slightly different ways.
Definitely different from anything I’ve read before.