[Burroughs] noted that there is an important difference between Naked Lunch and the books that follow …: his adaptation of the cut-up method of Brion Gysin. The Soft Machine develops out of the quest in the early novels, but the question that boldly opens the "Atrophied Preface" at the end of Naked Lunch is perhaps more important than the complex answers to it in the later works. "Wouldn't You?" triggers an elaborate program of anarchic individualism aimed at revitalizing the junk universe. As in the medieval romances, almost immediately after the hero asks the magical question the waters of life begin to flow.

Along with the myth, however, goes a cosmology, "a vision of the creation and destruction of the world that is vouchsafed to the successful hero." Here gods and demons will symbolize the forces at work inside and outside the hero's psyche which aid and distract him in his quest for the very source of the life force. This is the dimension of Burroughs' work that has most pleased and perplexed his critics and gained his work a reputation for "newness." Even here, however, novelty fades into familiarity when we see the basic outlines of a cosmogonic cycle involving good and evil, heaven and hell, emerging in the early books….

[For Burroughs, the basic element of life and matter] is junk—chaotic, self-consuming power—and the expansion of this principle informs his early work with a malign and enervating dreariness. In Junkie he presents the world of addiction in an impersonal style he has since called "journalistic," but the autobiographical facts recorded there become the cosmic metaphors of the tetralogy. The transformation of junk from fact to symbol is by far the most important result of this movement toward higher levels of abstraction in Naked Lunch. (p. 227)

The fundamental laws of Burroughs' universe are nearly codified [in his essay "Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness"]:

Junk yields a basic formula of "evil" virus: The Algebra of Need. The face of "evil" is always the face of total need. A dope fiend is a man in total need of dope. Beyond a certain frequency need knows absolutely no limit or control….

A situation of total need, constant crisis, and addiction has rendered the world of the early novels stagnant…. (p. 228)

Burroughs is obsessed with control systems—from Mayan codices to Scientology—and control and sex begin to fuse more and more in his later novels…. The most pernicious form of addiction [in Burroughs' work] however, is the word: Reichian engrams, Aristotelian either/or logic, and the declarative sentence itself. This manifestation becomes the number one enemy in Burroughs' work after 1960, and he personifies it in the "Atrophied Preface":

Gentle Reader, the Word will leap on you with leopard man iron claws, it will cut off fingers and toes like an opportunist land crab, it will hang you and catch your jissom like a scrutable dog, it will coil round your thighs like a bushmaster and inject a shot glass of rancid ectoplasm….

                                      (pp. 228-29)

That Burroughs has been able to follow the quest he began in Junkie through partial failure to a final vision of "the ultimate boon" that informs his work after Naked Lunch is perhaps his greatest achievement…. (p. 232)

The hero of Junkie, despite his cool, is not mature. The book is a Bildungsroman where Burroughs/Lee gets a thorough education in the laws of the junk universe and barely survives his testing. Despite what at first seem great differences, its closest contemporary analogue is Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye …, another record of initiation and partial success in a quest for freedom that ends with a balance of self-doubt and hope…. (p. 234)