Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing as a sixties epitaph from an anti-Vegas stance.

Evidence

Thompson makes Las Vegas the graveyard of the sixties. Las Vegas begins in the book as the antithesis of all that the sixties counterculture stands for, and this repudiation of Las Vegas—the primary meaning of ‘‘fear and loathing in’’—persists in Thompson’s overt narrative accounts of Vegas culture. Thompson’s most apparent, overt narrative self-positioning is in alignment with a countercultural, anti-Vegas, sixties sensibility, ethos, and aesthetic. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 310

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what the title phrase ‘fear and loathing in’ primarily means as anti-Vegas countercultural repudiation.
• XREF: connects to: Wolfe inhabited the undecidable cusp between modern and postmodern — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 284; Fear and Loathing simultaneously dramatizes betrayed American dreams and embraces a surface-only reality — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 329; Wolfe saw Vegas as corruption of modernism, not its repudiation — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 294 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Sixties counterculture found itself at home in Vegas because postmodernity emerged seamlessly from it #complicates (0.80) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 355