Fear and Loathing simultaneously dramatizes betrayed American dreams and embraces a surface-only reality

Evidence

This structure of ironic surface and profound, disturbing depth is characteristically modern. The emotional power of the book, I would argue, is primarily produced by this classic American sense of the betrayal and loss of the dream and promise embodied in America; in particular, of the utopian dream and promise of the American sixties. The book makes this claim for itself partly by its numerous allusions to not just to Heart of Darkness but to The Great Gatsby and Moby-Dick. … At the same time, however, the structure of surface and depth exists alongside or cohabits in the book with a different, in fact opposed structure, in which the postmodern lesson learned in Las Vegas is that surface is all. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 329

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a single text cohabits two opposed structures — depth-truth of loss and the truth that surface is all — is the book’s densest analytic move, and it pays off the whole volume’s thesis.
• XREF: connects to: Fear and Loathing’s excess enacts right-wing paranoia about the counterculture. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 321; Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing as a sixties epitaph from an anti-Vegas stance. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 310