Designated Villain: Salvador Hassan O'Leary is the intended villain, despite not being anywhere near as bad as Dr. Benway and only being slightly worse than A.J.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Dr. Benway, by far the most memorable character in the book, goes on to get small roles in several other Burroughs novels, like The Soft Machine, Cities of the Red Night, and The Western Lands, with brief mentions in several others. In The Film of the Book, he's a One-Scene Wonder (well, two scenes) and is played by Roy Scheider, who is appropriately scene-stealing, even when (during one of the two scenes) as Benway he's pretending to be an ordinary doctor running a clinic.
Hard-to-Adapt Work: William S. Burroughs considered the book to be this, being deliberately incomprehensible, disturbing, and having nothing in the way of overarching plot. As such, when he allowed David Cronenberg to adapt it into Naked Lunch, the latter compromised by crafting a new story that incorporates many themes from Burroughs's overall work. While still pretty Mind Screw-y, it's much less so than the book.
Harsher in Hindsight: The Divisionists are essentially the prototype of today's aggressive trolls.
Signature Scene: The story of the talking asshole is probably the most well-known passage of this novel, often quoted out of context.
Squick: Some in the minds of individual readers, and some In-Universe:
The descriptions of the blue movie sets make repeated note of piles of moldy jockstraps and used condoms - and that's far from the last of it!
A young junkie has an encounter with a man who gets a contact high by oozing all over him like an amoeba: "Most distasteful thing I ever stand still for."
Old junkies lose all sense of shame when someone starts cooking up a shot: "They gibber and squeal at the sight of it. The spit hangs off their skin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body’s decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it."
What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: Burroughs wrote in the preface that the hanging scenes were a tract against capital punishment 'in the style of Jonathan Swift'. One would find that easy to believe if he hadn't gone on to write about three more books about hanging, which makes the whole thing dubiously reek of Author Appeal.
