Comparing Gaiman's Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

. “Now,” said the demon, in a voice that carried with it no sorrow, no relish, only a dreadful flat resignation, “you will be tortured.” Like this quote, the voice of the demon is created through simple, short sentences but very descriptive. These descriptions are not what we usually think of hell because other readings and movies have embedded the image of hell as flames all around you while you are burning for your sins. Gaiman decided to go against this approach and decided to describe hell as empty with no flames, just you sitting there with only the demon while you are tortured by having to live through your sins again. “The room was long, and the demon waited by a smoking brazier at the far end. A multitude of objects hung on the rock-gray …show more content…
Liminality is a large part of the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Being liminal means “to exist equally in two worlds or states or to exist on both sides of a boundary.” In this case Duke and his attorney are both liminal because they are in the ‘real world’ of Las Vegas interacting with all those different people, but they are also in their drug induced hallucinatory world. An example is when they tried to talk to the hitchhiker he freaked out because he was in the ‘real’ world and not in their drug world. The hitchhiker could only see who these two people were, but not the images and everything Duke and the attorney were seeing. Because they are in two separate worlds at once it is hard for them to interact together. Due to the drugs they are on at one point Duke thinks about just giving the hitchhiker the car they are driving in, and later thinks about killing to keep him from going to the cops. At that point Duke is struggling between the two worlds he is in, he is paranoid that he will be caught because of how high he is, and the paranoia came from the drugs in the first place. Later in the book during another drug induced state Duke and the attorney trash their hotel room, they destroy almost everything and they vandalize things in the room. In their world of drugs this seems like normal behavior, something they should be doing. They don’t feel remorse until much later in the book. Duke finally begins to wonder if he will get caught and be punished for all the …show more content…
In “Naked” by David Sedaris, the author uses multiple points of views to talk about his life story, but the most prominent point of views used in this book are First person which is used to describe his life story and third person omniscient which is used to describe the roles the other characters had in his life and how they feel towards him and the other characters. First person is obviously used throughout the book but one example that shapes the books contents is “The moment I realized I would be a homosexual for the rest of my life, I forced my brother and sisters to sign a contract swearing they’d never get married.” When Sedaris finally realizes and accepts that he is homosexual it brings closure to the struggle of having to tell his family he had to live with throughout his entire life prior to this event. This point of view was able to shape the books content because the audience has been learning about the type of person Sedaris is through his own voice from the beginning of the book up until this point. In “Naked” Sedaris provides insight of what other people thought of each other. “My parents had been married for twelve years, and Ya Ya still couldn’t bring herself to call her daughter-in-law by name. My father had made the mistake of marrying an outsider, and it was my mother’s lot to suffer the consequences.” Sedaris used third person omniscient to tell how his grandmother from his father’s side fell about his about mother. I felt a connection with Sedaris