The book is considered dry, lucid, and straightforward compared to those later works, which expand on Junkie's themes of drug addiction and control.

[9] Burroughs and Kerouac were briefly arrested for not reporting the homicide,[10] then co-wrote a novel inspired by the event called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, which they were unable to get published.

[21] Back in Mexico City, on September 6, 1951, Burroughs fatally shot Vollmer; he had attempted to shoot a glass balanced on her head while drunk.

He argues that Burroughs wrote most of the novel before sharing it with Ginsberg, and that the book "shows no signs of an interpersonal epistolary aesthetic.

Although Burroughs edited these sections to match Junkie's first-person narration, this approach led to incongruities in the final text.

[35] Burroughs assembled the combined version by cutting up the original manuscripts and pasting them back together, a technique he would push much farther in his later books.

This release included previously unpublished material from Allen Ginsberg's archives, in which Lee builds an "orgone accumulator" based on the writings of Wilhelm Reich.

Junk wins by default.In a short prologue, William Burroughs describes his childhood as safe and comfortable, but marred by nightmares and hallucinations.

Bored with suburban life and inspired by Jack Black's autobiography You Can't Win, he began committing petty crimes.

Burroughs states that he failed to find steady work and was rejected from the army, but never needed money until he started using drugs.

He tries the drug for the first time, keeps some syrettes, then sells the rest to a buyer named Roy, who warns him about the dangers of addiction.

He reads about yage, a drug that may enable telepathy, and leaves Mexico City to seek it out, hoping it will fill the void that "junk" did not.

[39][20] Others, including Beat scholar Jennie Skerl, interpret the book as a novel and William Lee as a fictionalized caricature.

[40] William Stull considers the novel a Bildungsroman similar to The Catcher in the Rye,[41] while Oliver Harris argues that "the last genre to which Junkie belongs is that of the Künstlerroman.

[28] Oliver Harris notes that Burroughs' deadpan narration is often subtly ironic, as in Lee's observation that "You need a good bedside manner with doctors or you will get nowhere".

[47] The narration is interspersed with journalistic asides, which document various drugs, addiction treatments, laws, police procedures, and slang.

[48] In particular, Burroughs criticizes specific provisions in New York's public health laws and the federal Harrison Narcotics Tax Act.

[51] Lee routinely breaks the law and commits acts of cruelty, but his actions are described in straightforward prose without excuses or explicit value judgments.

[45] While the novel does not condemn or justify Lee's actions, it does criticize overzealous law enforcement,[45] doctors who try to control their patients,[52] and anti-drug legislation aimed at "penalizing a state of being".

[53] Burroughs emphasizes the negative aspects of addiction and the pain of withdrawal, only briefly mentioning the pleasurable effects of drugs.

[55] The novel describes opioid addicts with grotesque and dehumanizing language, such as comparing them to wooden puppets and deep-sea creatures.

Burroughs later expands on this motif in his follow-up novel Naked Lunch, in which heroin addicts metamorphose into surreal monsters.

The book ends with no clear resolution: Lee starts another cycle by heading South from Mexico City to find a new addictive substance, yage.

In reality, Burroughs fatally shot Joan Vollmer; he was allowed to leave Mexico after the courts ruled the shooting an accident, not a homicide.

A. Wyn asked Burroughs to add additional material explaining her character's disappearance, but he refused to write about the shooting.

He notes that "Later, [Burroughs] made the business of drug addiction into a vast encompassing metaphor; in this book he looks at it, with a remarkable cool lucidity, simply as the dominant fact of his life.

"[66] Mario Vargas Llosa wrote that while he did not care for Burroughs's subsequent experimental fiction, he admired the more straightforward Junkie as "an accurate description of what I believe to be the literary vocation".

[68] Beat scholar Jennie Skerl considers the novel a more successful portrait of hipster subculture than Norman Mailer's essay The White Negro.

She notes that Burroughs displays a deeper familiarity with the subculture's slang, and correctly identifies that drug use is central to the hipster worldview.

[70] Will Self argues that the novel fails to insightfully analyze addiction, in part because Burroughs was deluded about his own relationship with drugs.