There_Is_No_Life_but_Through_Death_

Anarchists and nihilists have always revolted against the normality and approval of society. From anarchist musicians like Marilyn Manson, who preaches against conformity to nihilistic villains such as the Joker in The Dark Knight, the attitudes and beliefs of both unions are represented in today’s society through mainstream media. An author who represents the ideas and spirit of nihilists and anarchists in every aspect of his work is Chuck Palahniuk, a modern existentialist writer. His novels are dark satires full of sinister humor and casts of self destructive depraved characters that live on the fringes of society. Palahniuk’s novels are packed full of fantastically strange details and destructive factoids such as how to make bombs, how to make soap out of human fat, how to pick up shards of broken glass with a slice of bread, and how to get lipstick out of a collar. Elements like his sense of humor and clever irony allow him to put a modern twist on existentialism and separate him from other stern-faced existentialist writers such as Dostoevsky and Kafka. Palahniuk’s plots revolve around characters with an unestablished sense of self. His plots are often about the protagonist consciously creating themselves based on newfound beliefs and their actions based on those beliefs. They try to separate themselves from society to form a unique identity. They rarely end up happy or even remotely content, but one may consider that part of Palahniuk’s dark humor. In his novels, Palahniuk also explores the acute sense of mortality obtained by the majority of people in today’s society and his personal fascination with death. The contrast between life and death plays a large role in Palahniuk’s novels both symbolically and thematically. Some of his characters view death as motivation to live whereas others are fascinated by death and anticipate it. In an interview with A.V. Club, Palahniuk answers the question “What is the meaning of life'” by saying, “Find joy in everything you choose to do. Every job, relationship, home… it’s your responsibility to love it, or change it.” His opinion is expressed in his novels through the life stories of main characters who are unhappy with their lives and strive to find purpose and happiness. His novel Choke analyzes the way one can both financially and physically sustain life by encountering death. Lullaby explores the mental power struggle that ensues when one has the power to kill someone just by saying a few words. In Palahniuk’s most popular novel, Fight Club, a thirty-year-old insomniac finds happiness through violently tearing away the societal boundaries that smother him. In the beginning of Fight Club, the narrator wants to find something that’s empowering and new and allows him to escape his button-down life. He feels that he is, in a sense, already dead and deprived of living because of the mundane structure of his life. He says, “The bruised, old fruit way my face had collapsed, you would’ve thought I was dead” (Fight Club 19). He admits that he’d rather die than continue living the way he does, “Every takeoff and landing, when the plane banked too much to one side, I prayed for a crash” (25). He starts attending support groups for people suffering diseases such as brain parasites and melanoma, seeking solace. By being a part of these groups, he is able to be around death without having to facehis own mortality. He says, “Walking home after a support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever felt” (22), showing that just being in the presence of people who are terminally ill is enough to make him feel alive. Compared to them, he is “the little warm center that the life of the world crowded around” (22). However, a woman named Marla Singer starts showing up at the same support groups and the groups lose their affect on him because, as the narrator explains it, “Marla’s lie reflects my lie, and all I can see are lies” (23). The narrator says, “Marla feels every moment of her life” (38). When confronted by the narrator about lying about having any diseases, she says, “You’re not dying either” (38). Marla explains to the narrator that “she actually felt alive. All her life, she never saw a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with” (38). If she has never encountered death in any form, then she can’t value life. Both Marla and the narrator need to find something that will enable them to directly experience death and bring him to the brink of his mortality so that they can have something to contrast life with. However, the narrator soon discovers that this concept is hard to come to terms with and facing death is more of a frightening and challenging experience than he expected. The first fight club is started by the narrator and his newfound best friend, Tyler Durden, whom he meets during a business trip. The narrator returns home from a business trip to find his apartment exploded and his valued furniture and possessions lying charred and worthless on the ground. He moves into Tyler’s dilapidated home and they attend fight club together every Saturday night. The narrator describes the experience of fight club by saying, “You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club… Fight club isn’t about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn’t about words… fight club isn’t about looking good. There’s hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved” (51). Fight club is an opportunity for the men involved in it to take out their aggressions. By being a part of fight club, they escape their routine, average lives. As they fight, they regress to their most primal state and when the fight is over, they return to the civilized human being they are in society. Fight club serves as a support group for men suffering from their everyday lives. With Tyler acting as the leader of fight club, it evolves into an organization called Project Mayhem. The narrator says that it is meant to “break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world” (125). Tyler explains the ultimate goal of Project Mayhem as “the complete and right-away destruction of civilization” (125). He wants cities to return to their primitive state where one can “climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower… you’ll climb up through the dripping forest canopy and the air will be so clean you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn and laying strips of venison to dry in the empty car pool lane of an abandoned superhighway” (125). Project Mayhem is Tyler’s way of actively taking control of the fate of the earth. He wants to rid it of the technology and pollution that take away from the naturalness of the earth itself. In order to achieve this goal, Tyler believes that he must enlighten everyone. He says, “First you have to know that you’re stupid and you will die… until you know that, you’re useless to me” (76). He wants everyone to come to terms with their mortality and use that realization to be inspired and let go of their meaningless possessions. Tyler gives members of Project Mayhem homework assignments that are tasks usually designed to cause disruptions in society such as drilling holes into bank machines and payphones and filling them with axle grease or pudding. One homework assignment is to bring the driver licenses of twelve human sacrifices to Tyler Durden. The purpose of this assignment is to enlighten other people, to force them to come to terms with their mortality. One of the narrator’s human sacrifices is a convenient store clerk named Raymond K. Hessel. The narrator holds a gun to Raymond’s head behind the store. He tells the clerk, “Listen, now, you’re going to die, Ray-mond K. K. Hessel, tonight” (153). After taking his wallet and antagonizing him, the narrator asks him what he wants to do with the rest of his life, but Raymond doesn’t have an answer. The narrator tells him, “Then you’re dead right now” (154). If Raymond doesn’t have any aspirations or purpose, he isn’t living. Eventually the narrator lets him go, saying, “Go back to school… tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of your entire life” (155). The narrator believes that by holding a gun to his head, he has scared Raymond into no longer fearing death. In his mind, Raymond now understands that there are worse things than death: living an unfulfilled, meaningless life. One night, the narrator is picked up from his work place by members of Project Mayhem. As the group drives down a highway, the driver points out the birthday cake he made for the narrator, but it’s not the narrator’s birthday. The driver gradually speeds up and begins driving recklessly. He swerves into the oncoming lane of traffic, trying to hit another car, and asks, “What will you wish you’d done before you died'” (145). The driver tells him to light the candles on his birthday cake and make a wish. The driver says, “Believe in me and you shall die, forever” (145) and collides with another car. The birthday candles go out, but as soon as the car has flipped into a ditch and the driver and narrator come to their senses, the flames of the candles flicker back on. The driver says, “Happy Birthday… Those birthday candles, they’re the kind that never go out” (147). This scene perfectly exemplifies that one must experience death in order to truly live. The birthday candles symbolize the idea that one must encounter death in order to be able to experience life. When they are first lit, they symbolize one’s instinctive fear of death. As they go out, they represent the experience of death and when they light once again, one’s ability to appreciate and live after facing death. In the end, the narrator is still afraid of accepting death as his inevitable fate. He is unable to live without the societal restraints because they are something that he is accustomed to. Even though he was a part of fight club and Project Mayhem, he remains fearful of death. When Tyler leaves, the narrator decides that he no longer wants to be a part of Project Mayhem or fight club. He wants to shut them down. When a member of Project Mayhem is shot dead while trying to execute a homework assignment, the narrator yells at the other members, “Project Mayhem is canceled… A man is dead… This game is over. It’s not for fun anymore… Go home” (178). The other members simply stare at him, showing no intentions to leave. The narrator travels to fight clubs around the country, trying to shut them down without success. As a drastic measure to escape the chaos created by Tyler Durden, the narrator attempts suicide. This shows his final acceptance of death. He survives the gunshot and wakes up in a hospital where members of Project Mayhem and fight club are working. A member says to him, “We look forward to getting you back” (208), which signifies that by nearly dying, the narrator now has something to contrast life with and therefore feel what it is to really live. Another of Palahniuk’s novels is Survivor. It’s the story of Tender Branson, a Creedish Death Cult survivor who starts off working as an unpaid servant in a rich couple’s house. As the alleged last survivor, the media becomes interested in him and turns him into a celebrity self-help guru. The chapters and pages are arranged in reverse chronological order: chapters begin at forty-seven and end at one; pages begin at 289 and end at one. The story is similar to Fight Club in that both protagonists share the need to indirectly encounter death so that they can be comfortable accepting that as their fate and they are both tired of being unhappy with their lives. However, Survivor differs from Fight Club’s main theme of one having to have a near-death experience in order to fully appreciate and value their life. Tender Branson is raised in a cult that teaches its followers that if they work hard enough, their lives will be worthwhile. Their purpose in life is preset; they have no freewill and no control over what they end up doing for the rest of their lives. Tender Branson has been taught that his purpose in life is to work as hard as he can, then die. The novel begins with Tender Branson in the cockpit of an airplane he has hijacked, telling his story to the jet’s black box before he crashes into the Australian desert. He begins his story by talking about the suicide hotline that was accidently published in the newspaper as his phone number instead of the actual number. Each night he talks to people calling his number thinking it’s a suicide hotline. This hotline serves the same purpose as support groups serve for the narrator in Fight Club. Through this hotline, Tender Branson is exposed to people who wish to die. He says, “These victims, they call. These chronic sufferers. They call. They break up my own little tedium” (Survivor 281). The hotline also acts as a source of entertainment for him. Some of them, when they call, are giving Tender Branson the power to choose whether or not they live or die. Most of the people that call, he tells them to kill themselves. “A guy’s calling to say he’s failing Algebra II. Just as a point of practice, I say, Kill yourself. A woman calls and says her kids won’t behave. Without missing a beat, I tell her, Kill yourself. A man calls to say his car won’t start. Kill yourself” (237). By telling these people to kill themselves, he’s putting their problems in perspective, whether it’s intentional or not. Instead of comforting them and sympathizing with them, he gets these people to appreciate their lives, problems and all, by telling them to go ahead and kill themselves. Even though they may have hit some turbulence in their lives, at least they’re not dead. The same way the narrator in Fight Club enlightened Raymond K. Hessel, Tender Branson enlightens these people. Tender Branson expresses his fascination with the afterlife by occasionally going to a mausoleum and listening to the tombs for any signs of life. He says, “I want to be chased by flesh-eating zombies… Not that I’m crazy or anything. I just want some proof that death isn’t the end” (255). In a way, the mausoleum also acts as a support group for him. “Even if crazed zombies grabbed me in some dark hall one night, even if they tore me apart, at least that wouldn’t be the absolute end. There would be some comfort in that (255). He wants to know that when he dies, life doesn’t just stop. He wants a guarantee that there is life after death. He wanders around, fantasizing about encountering the living dead so that he can be comfortable with the fact that he will one day die. While in the mausoleum, he spends his time logging the activity of each tomb in a notebook. While exploring the mausoleum, Tender Branson meets a woman named Fertility Hollis who is there to visit her brother’s tomb. Their meeting resembles that of Marla and the narrator’s in Fight Club because of the location in which they are introduced. Marla and the narrator meet in a support group full of terminally ill people and Tender Branson and Fertility meet in a mausoleum full of dead people. The Creedish cult that Tender Branson grows up as a part of believes that the purpose of one’s life is to work hard as a servant. The only things that members of the cult are allowed to say when seeing each other outside of the cult’s compound include things like, “May you be of complete service in your lifetime” (230) and “May you die with all your work complete” (230). Contrasting Fight Club narrator’s encounter with Raymond K. Hessel, Tender Branson says, “There are better things than freedom. There are worse things than living a long bored life…” (178). He believes that death is worse than living an unhappy life lacking adventure and freewill whereas Fertility justifies her cancerous brother’s suicide by saying, “Trevor killed himself because his life had no more surprises, no more adventure. He was terminally ill. He was dying of boredom. The only mystery left was death” (25). To her, it was right for Trevor to kill himself. Knowing when one will die ruins the experience of life. Their life becomes all about waiting for death, therefore taking away the excitement and wonderment and that once existed in their life. They no longer have the need to plan for the future. They cannot aspire to anything because there is no point. The Creedish cult’s purpose is to die in order to achieve eternal life in Heaven. Members are taught, “If the members of the church district colony felt summoned by God, rejoice. When the apocalypse was imminent, celebrate, and all Creedish must deliver themselves unto God” (229). Unlike members of Project Mayhem and fight clubs who only encounter death to bring deeper meaning to their lives, Creedish cult members anticipate death. They look forward to death as a holy, definite experience. At the end of Survivor, when all of the plane’s engines have burnt out and it’s moments away from crashing in Australia, Tender Branson says, “My story will survive. And I will live on forever” (1). He’s talking about how through telling his story to the jet’s black box, he has preserved his life’s story and therefore, has achieved immortality. Because Tender Branson believes that delivering himself is the right thing to do, he has also achieved eternal life in Heaven. Each of Palahniuk’s novels includes some aspect of life and death. Sometimes the protagonists view death as a motivator where as other see it as a finish line, something to aspire to. Palahniuk’s personal fascination with death is exhibited by Tender Branson’s zombie obsessions and the Fight Club narrator’s attendance at support groups for the terminally ill. In Fight Club, the narrator and members of Project Mayhem and fight clubs live with the philosophy that in order to escape the binds of society and live freely, one must first accept death as their inevitable fate, and then encounter it so as to defy humans’ instinctive fear of death. By participating in fight club, members are able to come in contact with their archaic roots. The narrator has trouble accepting death, but is eventually forced to when he attempts suicide. Tender Branson’s life has been scheduled from the start. The cult leaders decided what he would do with the rest of his life, so he works as a servant until the rest of the surviving cult members die out. Unlike Fight Club’s narrator, Tender Branson has no problem accepting death; it’s something that he has been anticipating since birth. Palahniuk’s demonstrates his opinion that life is only worth living if one is happy mainly through the protagonists of his books and the dilemmas they must face.