Survivor - Tender & His Baptism

To explain the decreasing page numbers,
the numbers in my book go backwards. =]


Rub the top of your meat loaf with and ice cube, and the loaf won't crack while it bakes.
To keep lace crisp, iron it between sheets of waxed paper.
We were kept busy learning. We had a million facts to remember. We memorized half the Old Testament.
We though all of this teaching was to make us smart.
What it did was make us stupid.
With all the little facts we learned, we never had the time to think. None of us ever considered what life would be like cleaning up after a stranger every day. Washing dishes all day. Feeding a stranger's children. Mowing a lawn. Painting houses. Year after year. Ironing bedsheets.
Forever and ever.
Work without end (Palahniuk, 193).

This passage is what Tender Branson, the main character, thinks of his last year with the church. I think his words shed light on his current situation. Those people, the elders of the church, were playing God with him in a way. They set up barriers, rules for him to live by, and they were the ones that created his destiny and fate. Free will, until he was sent out into the world, was a foreign concept to him. I think this is why he set up the suicide hot line and decided to choose whether people live or die. He's grasping for a sense of that control that the church had over him. Compensation for lost years, in a sense. This passage also reminded me of Oedipus Rex because the major concepts of the play are fate and free will, much like this book. For Tender, the question can be posed - if he had stayed in the church - do you really want to know that the life you're leading is far from 'normal'? Your oppressed? You're living an extreme? His 'truth' sitation mirrors the mom/killing the king situation that applies to Oedipus. Also, while you're reading, you have to keep in mind that he's telling you his life story while hes flying a plane thats going to crash and kill him. This also plays into his fate and free will because he had a choice not to initiate this situation. But by growing up in a environment like that, a church that had a suicide pact, is this really his free will? Or just his destiny coming back to haunt him?

Questions:
1) Does he go through with it!?! (the crash)
2) Is this book based on a true story? (Doubtful)
3) Did he ever have to deal with death as a child? (Besides within the bible/hell/sins/ect)
4) Does part of himself feel ashamed because he enjoys the construction and rules? (Now that he's in the placement program - real world)