William S. Burroughs's 'The Wild Boys'

Drug addiction, death, and Burroughs’ lifestyle exemplify voices from the fringe. Burroughs exposed ways of life that were forbidden and frowned upon during his time and through his works of literature, he explains how people lived through this time period as homosexuals and drug addicts living on the outside edge of society fighting for their freedom against oppression and government.

William S. Burroughs was born on February 5, 1914, in St. Louis, Missouri. Burroughs died in Lawrence, Kansas, on August 2,1997. He supposedly died from complications of a heart attack, which he incurred the day before. He was buried in the family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery, which is located in St. Louis, Missouri. His gravestone read his full name and the

Using a bit more lucid form of his "cut-up" style, The Wild Boys is a book that illustrates a group of wild boys rising up in the face of a very oppressive society. There tends to be a lot of sex, most of it being homosexual, but after the audience overlooks this, Burroughs shows some interesting sociological insight. Burroughs is a satirist at heart, and in this specific situation Burroughs is on the Wild Boys' side. Burroughs is also trying to "expose" the bedroom lives of the Moral Norm. Nonetheless, Wild Boys brings more of a clear message to rebel against these oppressive forces and enjoy life. The beginning of Wild Boys gives us glimpses of the corruption of the oppressing classes in a glorifying estate, which resembles a strange neverland ranch. Rich people are invited for a long while to eat, hang out, and have sex. The starving crowds are locked outside and taunted by the estate employees. The Boys also have their own strange society, but Burroughs writes in a much more positive view. Being very ritualistic and spiritual, the Boys join together and fight back for their freedom. Burroughs includes some interesting styles to the mix as well. Color often plays a huge role as symbolism and is often used to describe characters and places. In many instances, whole pages are nothing more than the same passage in a somewhat different variation written repeatedly. Sometimes these styles are

Burroughs is constructed in fragments with inconsistent characters morphing, changing and altering identities otherwise known as dynamic characters. Dream, hallucination, reality and drug visions blend, merge, and disperse. Obscene routines take a consistent form and read like humor from a bathroom wall, then fade into filthy fragments and irrelevant and often disgusting descriptions of sex acts. Everyone is a junkie, gay, screws teenaged North African boys, is insane, psychotic or diseased. Doctors kill their patients, police murder their suspects, and drug addicts infect their marks with insect diseases and turn into centipedes during sex acts that cause the reader to feel sick to their stomach. Burroughs was no fool and he had a strong moral dedication all the way. He considered himself a reporter who was behind enemy lines, like a journalist who returns from Vietnam with pictures of napalmed babies. Burroughs' title of Naked Lunch suggests an image of someone being aware to what they are eating. He seems to be depicting the relationship between the junkie and the drug dealer to be a metaphor for all control systems, whether it be capital punishment, abuse of political power, police states, or something else. By the time Naked Lunch became a novel, Burroughs had suffered through decades of abuse from the hands of federal agents, narcotics police and the customs officials of all the third world borderlines that he crossed as he moved