38 pages • 1 hour read
Chuck PalahniukInvisible Monsters
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1999A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 21-25Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary
Shannon is told she should at least have her jaw rebuilt or she could die from sleep apnea. She is depressed because she has just learned she doesn’t qualify to be a hand or foot model, and she expresses a desire to die. Brandy suggests she should embrace her current situation, saying, “The best way is not to fight it, just go. Don’t be trying all the time to fix things” (144).
Chapter 22 Summary
Back in the house for sale, after seeing Manus restrained by the real estate agent, Shannon drags a semiconscious Brandy back to the bathroom where she continues to feed her pills. Shannon finds her postcard from the Space Needle tucked inside Brandy’s book. She decides her past is over and she needs to move on.
Chapter 23 Summary
Shannon remembers Brandy teaching her and Manus how to steal drugs while touring houses for sale. Brandy expresses a wish to find her sister and explain everything to her. At the same time, Shannon writes Evie a letter asking for the insurance money on the house in exchange for not going to the police and telling them Evie shot her. Shannon claims to have had reconstructive surgery and to have won Manus back, claiming Manus is willing to testify as well. All the while, Shannon, Brandy, and Manus are traveling up and down the west coast. The more hormones Shannon gives Manus, the more he flirts with Brandy.
Shannon recalls how Manus was a police detective when they were first together. He worked vice, trying to entrap johns by wearing a speedo. Manus had trouble attracting men, so he began wearing smaller and smaller speedos and stuffing them with more and more objects, believing the appearance of a large penis would make him more sexually appealing. Manus would also take Shannon to gay bars in order to study pick-up techniques. Manus eventually lost his job and soon after began his affair with Evie.
Chapter 24 Summary
In the past, during a photoshoot at a slaughterhouse, Evie continues asking Shannon about Shane. Shannon tells her about the police investigation after Shane was burned, how he ran away, and how her parents got a phone call claiming Shane was dead. She admits she has always believed her brother put the can of hairspray in the burn barrel himself.
Chapter 25 Summary
During a shopping trip, Brandy talks about her childhood and several of the dishonest things her father did to make money. In addition to feeding the pigs expired bakery goods, he would pack potato sacks with rotting potatoes under the good potatoes and seal the bags so no one could tell. He also ground beef with ice to bulk it up with water and stole goods from a train. Brandy also confesses to burning her family’s clothes on the clothesline the day she left home. Finally, Brandy explains how a cop investigating the accident with the hairspray can molested her in his car. Brandy implies the cop was Manus, and Shannon is not sure what to believe.
Chapters 21-25 Analysis
While Shannon had been planning to kill Evie, her plan to blackmail her former friend replaces her homicidal one. This suggests that Shannon is not really capable of killing anyone despite her continuous poisoning of Manus’s food and drinks. However, she continues thinking of ways to kill Brandy. Shannon is caught between her desire to destroy the things that cause her distress and her instinctive need for intimacy with others.
Shannon recognizes Brandy’s stories from their shared childhood, and she remembers most of these moments, too. As Brandy talks, Shannon recognizes how toxic some of these behaviors on her father’s part were for her and Brandy. It doesn’t soften her anger at Brandy, but it does help her see a new side of things and begin to consider her past from a less self-centered perspective. This is an important moment of character development that prepares Shannon for her ultimate decision to give Brandy her identity.
When Brandy suggests Manus molested her as part of the investigation into the exploding hairspray accident, Shannon is uncertain if she can believe her because she worries Brandy has figured out her real identity and is pointing the finger at Manus to hurt her. However, Shannon recalls that Manus was a police detective when she met him, that he did come to the door of her childhood home to investigate the accident, and that it was this meeting that led to their relationship. She also recalls Manus’s odd behavior when he was working as a detective in vice, acting as a sex worker to entrap men paying for sex. Manus’s behavior suggests he was sexually interested in men and that both his sexuality and his capacity for harming others are more complicated than Shannon first assumed. The further Shannon gets from her previous life, the more Shannon is able to re-evaluate how she was shaped by her past and her present desires for her future. No one, including herself, is exactly who she thought them to be.
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By Chuck Palahniuk
