In Naked Lunch, Burroughs is beat; he truly channels a beat vision and song. In some ways he speaks for the beats, working with the rhythms of Ginsberg, and road-blues, high desparation imagery of Kerouac. There is a poetic voice in Burroughs that seems to be having a dialogue with Ginsberg's voice; it operates through a rhythmic and additive system, and usually plays close attention to the framework of an environment, it is an anthropological account of a way of living; the gritty social and industrial realities of a postmodern, urban environment. This line has the same monotone, buddha-tone, bardish chant of Ginsberg's song, "...a few old relics from hop-smoking times, spectral janitors, grey as ashes, phantom porters sweeping out dusty halls with slow old man's hand, coughing and spitting in the junk sick dawn..." (pg.5).

Burroughs also seems to possess a peculiar sense of mysticism. This surprised me, as I had pegged him for a strictly rational sort of cat. He says, "America is not a young land: it is olf and dirty and evil before the settlers, before the Indians. The evil is there waiting." (pg. 7). I wonder why that is. Why would American be any more wretched or malicious as any other plot of land?

When Will is sipping cough-syrup, high on the carlights, and rapid shifts of scene, and gasoline-fumes maybe; i am reminded much of Kerouac.

It may seem innapropriate to pretend to be talking about one person's work, but then go on ahead and prattle off some old academic or literary jive-talk. But I swear, I'm not doing so with any intent. The more I read Burroughs, the more I catch on to the loops. The same stuff is there in all his works, just circulating around in eternity, like that poor old battery-bike pig; the cut-up. He must have cut up everything that passed through his ears to his head, including the breath of his intellectual, spiritual, and sexual bretheren. I think that in some ways, Will Burroughs' musical tone in "Naked Lunch" is a sort of conduit to the voice of his time; a portal to a beat-way-of-seeing.