I just started this book and it is my first by Burroughs but

>>8969509
He chopped it up. There's a few narratives going on at once. It'll make sense after a while. I got bored of it though, so only got halfway before reading something else.

>>8969509

It's not meant to have a coherent plot. Take it episode by episode.

>>8969521
that contradicts >>8969519

Cities of the Red Night
The Place of Dead Roads
The Western Lands

Are just as crazy but not written in the cut-up style.
More people should read them, they're great.

>>8969523
This poster >>8969521 doesn't know what he's talking about. There are narrative threads that run across all Burroughs cut-up books. You piece the story together from fragments, and the story you piece together will be different from the story I piece together. To just read individual episodes as individual episodes, it's absolutely fucking gibberish about nothing.

>>8969591
that's what I thought it just wouldn't be a feasible book if it was as >>8969521 said

File: lol_burroughs.jpg (78KB, 465x383px) Image search: [Google]

78KB, 465x383px

OP: imagine you downloaded a tv series, except it was ripped from a DVD by a crazy person and is in pieces. not just out of order episodes - there's a scene here from the start, one from the end, and it's all out of order.

if you watch them all, eventually you can make some sense out of it.

by the way, did i ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk?

>>8969601
it's not about plot. there isn't a hero who goes on a journey of discovery and comes home wiser at the end. it's about ideas and images. the County Clerk was based on an official that Burroughs met once, possibly the most boring man to have ever lived, and Burroughs parodied this to see how far he could push it.

not a finer man in the Zone than old Bill!

>>8969509
happened to me while reading Soft Machine just stick with it

if you like it enough and still don't understand it just find some scholar's analysis

or get high

>>8969673
well love the options but probably go with the former
>say no to drugs