Analysis Of Chuck Palahniuk's Novel 'Invisible Monsters'

To quote the critical anthology, ‘Gender has to do not with how females (and males) really are, but with the way that a given culture or subculture sees them, how they are culturally constructed.’ In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel, Invisible Monsters, his combination of gender and identity challenges the perspective of this statement, at length.

In this novel, Palahniuk deals with different aspects of gender in a modern American society, such as the debated relationship between femininity and masculinity and the controversy of sexuality. Palahniuk makes his contribution to the continuing gender debate ‘by defying what is considered ‘normal’ in terms of gender through his portrayal of characters that are not bound by the social laws that follow sexual identity’ (Kjersti Jacobsen). Palahniuk, however, does not consider his novels to be about this, stating that in all his novels, ‘gender becomes unimportant.’ And it is this assertion which makes his input to the worldwide gender debate such an interesting topic of discussion. Furthermore, through these essentially ‘uncategorised’ characters which Palahniuk creates, he illustrates the idea that there is an uncertainty about who we are.

Palahniuk’s novel tells the story of a young fashion model, the protagonist, who is bored of being a beautiful woman, so sets out on a mission to escape the addiction of being beautiful. The story is told in a first person, non linear narrative, beginning with the end of the narrative, then jumping through a number of events, all of which are out of sequence; starting most paragraphs with ‘Jump to’. Palahniuk creates this narrative structure to create the feel of a modern female magazine, where the reader jumps from page to page. However, some critics have a...

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...ory to live by, presenting a strong male dominance over a female protagonist.

As Francisco Collado-Rodríguez states, ‘Gender is understood to be a cultural creation and therefore subject to redefinition.’ Although ambiguous, this could be implying that there are no limits to gender. A person’s biological sex can be easily re-constructed by having operations and taking drugs. He adds, ‘Without limits, personages abundantly transgress the gender marks of patriarchy’. Furthermore, supporting Kjersti Jacobsen’s statement, ‘Sex does not cause gender, and gender cannot be understood to reflect sex’. So, there are no clearly defined borders between gender and sex. Thus, according to the theories of Judith Butler, ‘If the post human being is a construct, it can be reconstructed as man, woman, transvestite, or fully transsexual being, and as homo-, hetero-, or bisexual.’