The book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson is a book about escaping the world around us. Thompson shows the reader this through the subject matter of the book, things that the characters do, and through the different characters experiences. To these men the American dream was Vegas and drugs.
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is about a journalist named Raoul Duke and his attorney, Dr. Gonzo. The two men head to Las Vegas to cover a motorcycle race and find the "American dream". They leave for this trip renting a red convertible, and filling the trunk with drugs. From the opening few lines of the novel the two men are high. .
"We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls-(Thompson, 4).
The drugs were the escape comes from. When the get to Las Vegas the two check into their hotel and their drugged up escapades begin. They spend the rest of the book going from situation to situation in a drugged state. Thompson goes into great detail about how the two men acted under the influence of drugs. .
"This is the main advantage of ether: it makes you behave like the village drunkard in some early Irish novel total loss of all basic motor skills: blurred vision, no balance, numb tongue - severance of all connection between the body and the brain. Which is interesting, because the brain continues to function more or less normally you can actually watch yourself in this terrible way, but you can't control it." (Thompson, 45).
This is the detail that Thompson goes into when explaining how they feel when on drugs. It also shows the feeling they get and gives you an impression of why they did the drugs, to escape the real world.
