The Finger by William S. Burroughs
PLOT SUMMARY
In “The Finger,” an unnamed narrator recounts a bizarre and unsettling incident: he notices that the tip of his finger is infected, eventually becoming necrotic and falling off. Rather than reacting with horror, the narrator grows fascinated with the dismembered digit, which seems to take on a life of its own. He keeps the finger, treats it as a pet or talisman, and even carries it around in a box. Eventually, he loses it— or it escapes—leaving the narrator feeling a sense of personal loss or incompletion.
The story operates within a grotesque dream logic, blending the mundane with the macabre, and emphasizing the narrator’s detachment from conventional ideas of health, identity, and the body.
LITERARY ANALYSIS
Themes
• Alienation from the Body: Burroughs explores the idea of bodily disintegration as a metaphor for psychological and social alienation. The narrator does not react to the loss of his finger with horror but instead with curiosity and eventual obsession. This estrangement from his own physical form reflects a deeper detachment from self and society.Control and Loss of Control: The gradual decay and detachment of the finger symbolize the narrator’s diminishing agency. His inability—or refusal—to stop the decay shows a surrender to entropy. The finger, once detached, seems to act independently, suggesting a breakdown of personal sovereignty.
• Object Fetishism and Surrealism: The narrator’s fixation on the severed finger borders on fetishism. His treatment of it as a sentient object reflects Burroughs’ fascination with surrealism and the uncanny, where boundaries between subject and object blur. The grotesque becomes strangely intimate.
• Decay and Mortality: Burroughs frequently returns to imagery of decay and rot as both literal and metaphorical. Here, the decay of the body is not a source of hor-
ror but a process that invites curiosity, even affection. It suggests a posthuman or antihumanist perspective on the self as fragmented and impermanent.
Narrative Style and Technique
• Flat Affect and Deadpan Tone: The narrator describes horrific events—such as the infection and dismemberment—with a detached, clinical tone. This creates a jarring contrast between content and tone, emphasizing Burroughs’ hallmark use of deadpan surrealism.
• Minimalism and Compression: The story is tightly compressed, like a literary sketch or parable. This intensifies its surreal atmosphere and prevents the reader from settling into conventional expectations about character development or plot resolution.
• Ambiguity and Open Interpretation: Burroughs avoids clear moral, psychological, or symbolic conclusions. The finger could symbolize addiction, trauma, a split identity, or simply serve as an absurdist object with no deeper meaning. The reader is left to decide.
Key Quotations
• “It just fell off. I didn’t even feel it.”
• “I kept it in a little box. I liked
having it with me.”
These lines illustrate the narrator’s dissociation and unnatural calm in the face of bodily trauma, central to the unsettling tone of the story.
QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER
1. How does Burroughs’ tone influence your reaction to the grotesque imagery in the story?
2. What might the severed finger represent on a symbolic level? Is it merely physical, or metaphorical?
3. In what ways does the story reflect Burroughs’ larger themes of control, addiction, or bodily violation?
4. What effect does the story’s surrealism have on your understanding of the narrator’s psychology?
CONCLUSION
“The Finger” is a concise but deeply layered story that encapsulates many of Burroughs’ recurring motifs: disintegration of self, surreal detachment, and the thin boundary between the grotesque and the intimate. Through its bizarre imagery and clinical narration, the story pushes readers to confront questions of identity, embodiment, and the limits of meaning itself.