My love affair with Steinbeck was followed with a one night stand with Palahniuk. His biting satire of the media, our conception of importance, fame and modern religion is striking but fails to function as inspiring commentary. With lines like : "You realize that there's no point in doing anything if nobody's watching" and "If Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven?" Palahniuk makes it clear his reputation as a nihilist is well earned.
Survivor, like many of Palahniuk's novels, thrusts the ugly and the embarrassing upon the reader. He exposes mankind, society, you and I as unthinking, animalistic nobodies. Tender Branson, the protagonist, is doomed from the very start of the narrative- he is alone on a commercial airliner slowly running out of gas. The book's first page is 289, the first chapter 47. The plane will crash, Branson will die, yet the reader still finds him or herself begging for Tender's redemption, his salvation. Tender is our innocent mortality. Just as we all one day will die, Palahniuk makes it clear that Tender will follow suit before the novel comes to an end.
Just as our own rationalizations curb our fears of mortality, failure and rejection, Palahniuk crafts a narrative in which the reader begs Tender to get the makeover, take the drugs, have the sex in order to solve his problems. By changing himself, his psyche- he can find happiness, redemption. Although the novel closes with inevitable death and imminent destruction, Palahniuk offers us salvation and immortality within our own humanity. Within the blood, hair, bones and semen of our human cesspool we can find some beauty or connection that will outlive our timeline. No divine intervention. No miracles. Just flawed men and women living a a flawed world.
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