"In the City Market is the Meet Café. Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One..."

The Beat movement lasted for barely a decade, so its authors left us with only a few major works. This novel is one of them. Many people view it as the post-modern text.

Why, you ask? Naked Lunch was written using the cut-up technique. Which is exactly what it sounds like. Burroughs wrote a lot of prose, then chopped it all up and rearranged it in a random order.

He also wanted people to be able to read the chapters in any order. This technique therefore plays with readers' expectations of what makes good literature. A linear, complete, comprehensive story…? Nah. If you're looking for something like that, look elsewhere.

Naked Lunch is kind of like the choose-your-own-adventure of confessional Beat works. And we think it was Burroughs's choice to infuse real randomness into the novel—not just the appearance of chaos—that really set him apart from his modernist predecessors.

Here we are at the "Meet Café," where things made of meat meet up. Huh? See, Burroughs de-humanizes his characters, partly to make a point about the effects of serious drug abuse on the human body and brain.

But the disturbing dehumanization of Burroughs's characters also results from his writing technique. When you cut up all your sentences and rearrange them in a random order, your human and non-human descriptions get all mixed up.

The world he constructs, then, is like a waking nightmare. Chaotic. Scary. Hard to understand. And these sentiments, fostered by the cut-up technique, contribute even more to the significance of the work than the meanings of his individual sentences do.

The point? Burroughs wants to remind us that we are all animals. Even though we can produce art, and become great thinkers, readers, and writers, we're still animals. So, if you buy into Burroughs's point-of-view, feel first and think later.

Burroughs uses commas to knit together his crazy, disjointed images. So they read like one (seriously wacky) continuous thought. This technique contrasts with Ginsberg's preferred method for separating ideas: the dash.

The dash separates one phrase from another more strongly than the comma. In Burroughs's world, images blend together like a kid's finger painting. Everything is just slopped on the page and allowed—no, encouraged—to swirl together.