Surivor - Final Blog

"Comment on the perspective from which the book is told and how the author's choice affects your relationship with the books content"

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My relationship with Survivor has developed into being a very good one. Chuck Palahniuk has clearly mastered the art of story telling in the first person. I feel as though this is what made the difference between Survivor being a great novel and a terrible one. Chuck's unique perspective made this book easy to read, relate able, and believable.

We journey through the book with our main character, Tender Branson. I think it's extremely important that the author chose to use Tender's voice than narrating the story for him. One of the whole aspects of the book is having control of yourself and your life so it was only appropriate that Tender got to tell his story. I think this made the book an easier read for me over all. I haven't completed a full piece of literature (besides Oedpius Rex) in ages, and how Palahnuik writes makes it seem more like a conversation than a 300 page novel..

The language used through out the story was honest and brutal. I think many authors go wrong by trying to make the characters seem overly average. Overly human. How Tender Branson speaks is how I would think his train of thought sounds. He was extremely relate able and provoked many emotions from me. I was able to find situations in my life which paralleled the ones he went through just in less extreme ways. I related this whole story to our project on fate. How Tender spoke helped bring the concept of fate down to a easily understood level, and allowed me to think deeper about the subject. I think that if Chuck used a different style at any point through out the book the idea of fate would have been lost, because the character would be portrayed as an abstraction of himself and not something readers could grasp and digest in their minds.

Writing a novel about a religious cult is something that, in my mind, would fall into unbelievable territory easily. By writing Survivor in first person, we get to hear the story verbatim from Tender Branson. In doing this, the issue of 'this is a second hand story' disappears from our minds and it allows the readers to focus more on the plot and less on 'could this happen?'. When I read the summary on the back of the book i was skeptical. I thought that Survivor would be completely unrealistic and I was worried I was going to get hung up on that. When I started to read i was impressed by how much of the story incorporated real elements and real situations that happen every day. Once again, by keeping it first person Tender became a human to the audience and not just a character. I believed the words he said and I felt like I could meet someone like him in my life. I was able to absorb the major points of the novel and I could easily see something like this happening. Chuck Palahnuik made Tender unique in his own right but invested enough universal human qualities in him that he was able to be felt for by the audience and I genuinely think that if the story written as an over exaggeration i would have not enjoyed the book or taken the message the author was trying to convey to heart.

Survivor is a beautifully written novel about fate, life, and how we live it. Although the story line was taboo, the characters were real people and Chuck did a great job at showing the audience this. I think that, for me, it was a smart choice to get myself back into reading. If i had chosen any other book for my first independent reading I don't think i would have gotten as much as i did out of this Oedipus Rex unit. Palaniuk pegged the correct style of writing perfectly. I'd recommend this book to anyone, and if he had written the novel in any other way I believe his important message would have been lost in translation.