fear and loathing in las vegas halloween costume

In an interview with the Paris Review, he was typically circumspect on the matter, pretending not to remember, but suggesting that “Raoul” came from Fidel Castro’s brother. Thompson, an incorrigible self-mythologizer, was reluctant to explain and, as he did when asked about what really happened in Las Vegas, simply complicated matters further by giving contradictory or deliberately vague answers. With some effort, one can delineate the real and the imagined in most of Thompson’s work, yet it is far harder to pin down just where exactly Duke came from and why he was given his unusual name. Indeed, it is quite possible to pick apart the real and the imagined in Thompson’s hallucinatory Gonzo prose, and many of his close friends will attest to the marked distinction between Thompson the author and Duke the character. But of course these were carefully invented for satiric purposes. To them, the exploits of Duke and Gonzo were a relatively faithful account of Thompson and Acosta’s own Vegas adventures.

Less interested in his literary innovations than his outrageous actions, most fans seem utterly unaware that Raoul Duke was merely a figment of Thompson’s prodigious imagination. In his writing, he readily presented himself as a cartoonish outlaw and in public he played the role his fans wanted to see, frequently appearing on stage in costume whilst blind drunk and openly imbibing illegal substances.Įven today, the Duke/Thompson image is a popular Halloween costume and dorm-room poster, and on social media thousands of fans proudly boast about their own consumption of hallucinogenic substances whilst quoting Raoul Duke and attributing his words to Thompson. Hordes of young fans viewed Thompson and Duke as one and the same-something that irked the writer, even if he did little to dissuade them. The device he had created to fuse fact and fiction in a wholly original form of literary journalism quickly became an encumbrance. The story, published in book form the following year, catapulted Thompson to fame, but before long he was frustrated by the fact that readers could hardly separate him from his creation. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas introduced a generation of readers to the hilarious and shocking antics of Raoul Duke and Doctor Gonzo: larger-than-life characters based loosely upon Thompson and his friend Oscar Zeta Acosta. Thompson published a two-part story in Rolling Stone that could only be categorized as Gonzo-a one-man literary genre marked by bizarre flights of fancy, hyperbole, depictions of drug abuse, and often violence.

Fear and loathing in las vegas halloween costume