I’ve not yet read it, but plan to soon. Just came across a nice tidbit from a reader review of Naked Lunch on Amazon. :

“by taking his own drug addiction both concretely and as a metaphor for human existence–in a strange sense, that we’re addicted to being who and what we are, and that forces in our ‘civilization’ are living vampirically off the energy of our frozen patterns of behavior, like a power-pyramid whose apex is anywhere the Man can be found. There are those addicted to controlling their own and others’ humanity, and those who let reality speak through them. “