Study on the Concept of Time in William Burroughs’ Junky

Abstract

William Burroughs is a distinguished American writer of the twentieth century. As a typical representative of the Beat Generation, his works are full of drug and homosexual elements, and his writing does not follow the traditional rules of creation, and is not confined to the established form, framework, and structure, characterized by vulgar language, loose structure, and form, and is an important spiritual leader of postmodernist literature. His first novel, Junky, is a semi-autobiographical novel based on William Burroughs the article presents to the reader the truth about drugs in the simplest and most straightforward way. Since the publication of the novel, scholars have studied the characters, the social context, and the political elements of the novel through the text. In the course of the author's study of the text, it was found that time in the drug addict's world does not exist in a conventional time as we perceive it, and we call this unconventional time "drug time". Based on the addict's perception of drug time, it can be found that drug time is very postmodern, personalized, fragmented, and diversified. The author uses physical time, psychological time, and literary time to integrate and analyze the time clues in the text to explore the role of time in drug addiction and the cause-and-effect relationship behind the addict's strange behavior.