To fully understand the uniqueness of Burroughs's technical elements in Naked Lunch, it is necessary to consider one of the problems he faced during its period of composition, organization, and revision — although even those elements do not sufficiently describe the manner in which the book was assembled. In a letter to Allen Ginsberg in the early 1950s, Burroughs wrote that he had "hopes of getting what he really means down on paper" but that he "despair[ed] of ever doing so." To Jack Kerouac, he worried about the limits of the genre itself, "I tell you the novel is completely inadequate to express what I have to say. I don't know if I can find a form." The manuscript originally consisted of notes Burroughs had been making for years, plus letters he had written (The Yage Letters, 1963) to Allen Ginsberg, and while he...