SOURCE: Foster, Dennis A. “Fatal West: W. S. Burroughs's Perverse Destiny.” In Sublime Enjoyment: On the Perverse Motive in American Literature, pp. 130-52. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Foster examines Burroughs's rejection of the values of Western civilization.

Shortly before the suicide of Kurt Cobain, lead singer for the group Nirvana, I heard a cultural commentator say that if you find a kid who listens to Cobain and reads W. S. Burroughs, chances are he also uses heroin. A recent television advertisement for workout shoes featured Burroughs extolling the virtues of technology, his familiar image (black suit and hat, gaunt face) on a micro TV that lies like junk in a wet alley while a high-tech-shod urban youth runs past. In the film Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Burroughs appears briefly as the priest-turned-junkie who had introduced the protagonist (Matt Dillon) to drugs and who unrepentantly explains that...