In the Massachusetts trial, now recognized as a landmark censorship case, defense attorney Edward de Grazia called writers such as Allen Ginsberg, John Ciardi, and Norman Mailer to testify to the book's literary merit.

Burroughs was attracted by the zone's reputation for allowing drug use and homosexuality, as portrayed in the works of Paul Bowles,β and declared his intention to "steep myself in vice".

[12] However, the novel's Interzone is also closely related to the fictional "Composite city" Burroughs described in his earlier The Yage Letters, which he wrote before visiting Tangier.

[21] In 1957, Allen Ginsberg submitted the Naked Lunch manuscript to Olympia Press, which had a reputation for publishing controversial novels such as Tropic of Cancer and Lolita.

[25] Irving Rosenthal resigned from the Review and founded a new literary magazine with Pete Carroll called Big Table, which published the suppressed material in its first issue.

[27] On June 4th, 1959, the Post Office launched a formal hearing over Big Table's obscenity, with a particular focus on Burroughs' Ten Episodes from Naked Lunch and a short story by Jack Keruoac titled "Old Angel Midnight".

[28] Joel Sprayregen, Big Table's attorney, advocated for the magazine's literary value and insisted it was not obscene under the criteria established in Roth v. United States.

[29] Pete Carroll, the magazine's co-founder, testified that he considered Burroughs a satirist in the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Nathanael West[30] and that his social criticism required vulgar language.

[46] John Ciardi compared the book to a hellfire sermon akin to the works of Dante Alighieri and Hieronymous Bosch and argued its vulgarity was a key part of its effect.

[52] Allen Ginsberg discussed the book as a metaphor for addiction in general, analyzed connections between the novel's depictions of sexuality and drugs, and read his poem "On Burroughs' Work" from the stand.

[53] In his cross-examinations, William Cowin suggested the novel was anti-Catholic,[54][55] quizzed the witnesses on whether they could remember its characters,[56] and challenged them to interpret provocative passages like the talking anus scene.

Grove compared Naked Lunch to Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Tropic of Cancer, which had also been challenged for obscenity, and included transcripts of the court testimonies in a new edition of the book.

Lee finds that Interzone is centered around a black market of drugs and giant centipede meat, and its residents include monstrous creatures called Mugwumps.

The city is contested by four rival political parties: Liquefactionists, who want to merge everyone into one protoplasmic entity; Senders, who want to control everyone else through telepathy; Divisionists, who subdivide into replicas of themselves; and Factualists, who oppose the other three.

's and Hassan's sadomasochistic parties, Benway's unethical experiments, other characters' grotesque transformations, and abstract cut-up sequences with no clear narrative arc.

The title originally referred to a planned three-part work made up of "Junk", "Queer" and "Yage", corresponding to his first three manuscripts, before it came to describe the book later published as Naked Lunch.

They atrophy and amputate spontaneous like the little toe amputates in a West African disease confined to the Negro race and the passing blonde shows her brass ankle as a manicured toe bounces across the club terrace, retrieved and laid at her feet by her Afghan hound... Naked Lunch is a blueprint, a How-To Book... Black insect lusts open into vast other-planet landscapes... Abstract concepts, bare as algebra, narrow down to a black turd or a pair of aging cojones... — Atrophied Preface, Naked Lunch [76] The majority of Naked Lunch does not follow any clear structure, chronology, or geography.

[83] This structure builds on that of Burroughs' incomplete previous novel Queer, which began as a conventional narrative before fragmenting into its own series of episodic routines.

Brion Gysin, staying in Paris' Beat Hotel alongside Burroughs, suggested he view the work as a painting observed all at once rather than a traditional novel, which can only be read linearly.

[90] Many of the novel's grotesque images revolve around consumption: people are described as animals like vampire bats and boa constrictors, trade giant centipede meat, and depend on the secretions of monsters called Mugwumps.

The novel is especially critical of the Senders, describing them as "the Human Virus", interested in control solely for its own sake, and the root cause of "poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, [and] insanity".

[119] Ron Loewinsohn identifies the political parties as representing different methods of international control: Liquefactionists as fascism, Divisionists as colonialism, and Senders as the soft power and cultural influence of the United States.

One of the book's most political routines mocks the Nationalist Party Leader, describing him as a "gangster in drag" who cares only about his own position, not the residents of Interzone.

The anus claims to want equal rights before taking over the body, and the routine is juxtaposed with Dr. Benway calling democracy a cancer, suggesting that egalitarianism can become authoritarian.

She wrote that Burroughs was one of only two authors who had recently interested her (along with Nabokov), defended his crudeness by placing him in the satirical tradition of Jonathan Swift, and praised his "broad and sly" humor by comparing it to vaudeville.

[142] John Ciardi, defending the book against charges of obscenity, praised it as "a masterpiece of its own genre" and "a monumentally moral descent into the hell of a narcotic addiction.

[144] J. G. Ballard considered the novel (along with The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded) to be "the first authentic mythology of the age of Cape Canaveral, Hiroshima and Belsen" and favorably compared Burroughs' work to Finnegans Wake and The Metamorphosis.

[147] Lionel Abel compared the work to a film that spliced together pornography with footage of Nazi concentration camps, writing "Now it is foolish, I think, to justify Naked Lunch as literature.

[152] Charles Poole, reviewing the book for The New York Times, criticized its "glaringly gaudy" approach of "using shocking words by the shovelful and concentrating on perverted degeneracy to a flagrant degree.

[154] Fans of Beat Generation literature, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker named their band Steely Dan after a "revolutionary" steam-powered dildo mentioned in the novel.