My previous exposure to William S. Burroughs was only via his collaborative novel with Kerouac, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a book that tells the story of a murder amongst a group of drug addled Brooklynites in the height of the second world war. For me, it was interesting to discover Burroughs view of the predetermined human thought process, or the 'mechanical mind'. It seems to me that Burroughs is a true believer in operant conditioning, being that external control can stem from responses to environmental stimuli. His views on language as restrictive and alien were interesting, and I found it impressive that his cut up method seemed to grow out of a desire to circumnavigate the restrictions of writing in linear form. To write an entire novel in this style from a larger group of work (he called this manuscript the 'Word Hoard') seems like an incredibly daunting task. It seems as though Burroughs wanted to see new ways to construct narratives and novels, to get past the traditional steps of drafting and editing from a set block of continuous prose. His ability to experiment in the beginning stages of writing shows his dedication to creating works of rarity and strangeness. It's also interesting to note that Burroughs experimented with this method vocally as well, using layered tape recordings, creating a blurry mess of words that spawned new sentences and phrases.
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