Essay on Narcopolis

The title of the novel, Narcopolis, is consisting of a compound word, which is compound by the two words narco and polis. Most of us are familiar with the word narco but polis originally comes from Latin and means city. The author gives the reader a hint about what the novel circulates around that is to say a city of drugs. The prologue reveals some of the theme’s the novel is dealing with, which would be hopelessness, drugs and the addiction attached to them.

A destructed mind controlled by the voice of opium belongs to the narrator who is about to tell the reader this heart-racing story. The narrator is telling from a dual perspective, which is shown when the prologue is leading off with narrator directly speaking to the reader and explaining that this story is about to be told from another person’s point of view “…and now we’re getting to the who of it and I can tell you that I, the I you’re imagining at this moment…that isn’t the I who’s telling this story…”(page 1). The prologue is constructed as a guided instruction to how the reader should read the following novel. Existing of one long sentence the prologue illustrates how the narrator is taking one long puff off an opium pipe. The construction is combined with how the narrator is telling the story – slow and continuously remembering to hold his tongue and take his time to puff on an opium pipe. This way the reader is drawn into a world conquered of a heavy fog only revealing the opaque surface that covers the brutal consequences of drugs. Because of the unreliable narrator, the reader constantly has to see through the heavy fog that covers the narrator’s sight and separate the facts coming from a voice influenced by drugs from the truth “…maybe I is, maybe the O is the I and I is unreliable, my memory like blotting paper…”. The narrator leading the prologue off is clearly