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.
Character Analysis
Shannon McFarland
Shannon McFarland is the first person narrator of the novel, often referred to by the aliases “Daisy St. Patience” and “Bubba Joan.” Once a model by profession, Shannon experiences a crisis of identity after she intentionally injures herself with a rifle and loses portions of her lower jaw. The resulting loss of her fiancé, her career, and her best friend prove to be more difficult than she expects, and Shannon feels isolated from her support systems as she attempts to reconstruct her sense of self. After Shannon and Brandy Alexander become quick friends in the speech therapist’s office, Brandy teaches Shannon how to wear a veil and convinces her that she can recreate herself entirely. Shannon embraces this idea out of her desire for more agency over the way that others perceive her. When Shannon learns that Brandy and her supposedly deceased brother Shane are the same person, Shannon plots revenger against Brandy, her ex-friend, and her former fiancé, believing that they have all deceived her. Throughout the novel, Shannon attempts to reconcile her destructive impulses with her desire for a new life completely free of association with her previous identity.
Shannon’s self-destructive impulses are motivated by her desire to escape the assumptions others make about her because of her conventional beauty. As Shannon goes on the run with Brandy and Manus, she reflects on her childhood and how her parents showed more affection toward her sibling, even after her parents disowned “Shane” and believed their child to be dead. Shannon’s unsuccessful attempts to earn her parents’ attention and approval drive her desire for revenge against Brandy and dissatisfaction with self. By the end of the novel, Shannon realizes that she and Brandy have more in common than she believed, and she gives Brandy her former identification so Brandy can have the life she no longer wants. As Shannon learns more about the complex experiences that inform the identities of those closest to her, she learns to take ownership of her own sense of self through constructive rather than destructive means, and to view Brandy with greater compassion.
Brandy Alexander
Brandy Alexander embodies her own philosophy that the destruction of the past is a means to self-determination in the future. Although Brandy grew up with the adoration of the McFarland parents, she felt trapped in her existence as “Shane”. For this reason, she put a bottle of hairspray in a fire barrel and was burned when it exploded, leaving her with permanent scarring that engendered even more affection from her parents. After the explosion, an investigation began that ended with Brandy’s traumatic sexual abuse by a detective from the local police department When Brandy contracted a sexually transmitted infection from this non-consensual experience, the anti-gay biased McFarlands assumed it was the result of sexual intimacy with another man and disowned their child.
Brandy’s traumatic childhood experiences deeply affect her sense of identity. Similar to Shannon, Brandy seeks reinvention of the self through destruction of the old self. Before her transition, she wanted to have her limbs removed, but no doctor would perform the surgery. The Rhea Sisters encourage Brandy to undergo multiple plastic surgeries, mentor her through her transition, and call the McFarlands to tell them that “Shane” died of complications from AIDS. Brandy meets Shannon while awaiting her final gender confirmation surgery.
Palahniuk’s portrayal of Brandy is intentionally controversial in its suggestion that Brandy’s transition is motivated more by self-destructive impulses rather than her desire to affirm her gender identity. This characterization risks perpetuating harmful biases that undermine the validity of transgender identities, and is indicative of Palahniuk’s transgressive aesthetics. Brandy’s main function in the novel is to exemplify the pursuit of total agency over one’s identity, and a reckless approach to crafting one’s desired life. By the end of the novel, Shannon discovers that Evie and Brandy have actually set Shannon up to bring excitement to their lives and to reunite the siblings.
Evelyn “Evie” Cottrell
Evie Cottrell and Shannon attend modeling school and work together as models. Shannon believes Evie is her best friend, but after she is shot, she discovers Evie and Manus are having an affair. Manus and Evie each try to convince Shannon that the other is responsible for shooting her, not knowing that Shannon’s wounds are self-inflicted.
Evie is highly dramatic, outgoing, and seeks to be the focus of attention. As in her childhood, Shannon is often pushed to the side when she is with Evie; however, Shannon does not realize this in the moment. Shannon also does not notice that Evie asks about “Shane” on multiple occasions, even questioning why Shannon believes her brother is dead. At the end of the novel, this connection becomes obvious: Evie is also transgender and met Brandy in a transgender support group. It was Evie who told Brandy about Shannon’s accident to allow Brandy to be at the speech therapist’s office to meet Shannon. It also turns out that Brandy and Evie plotted the shooting at the beginning/end of the novel in order to bring more excitement to their lives.
The fact that Evie is transgender isn’t revealed until the end of the novel. It has very little bearing on the overall plot, except that it is the reason Brandy and Evie know one another. Everyone in this novel struggles with their identity in one way or another, but Evie might be the only one who is truly comfortable with who she is.
Manus Kelley
Manus is a police detective when he meets Shannon at her parents’ home while investigating the hairspray accident. They run away together and Shannon becomes a model. Manus is an undercover vice cop whose job it is to entrap men paying for sex. However, Manus struggles with his lack of sexual appeal to these men and eventually loses his job. While on the run with Brandy, after Shannon’s accident and their broken engagement, Shannon begins to reconsider Manus’s sexual identity and motivations. It becomes clear to Shannon that Manus is attracted to men, but struggles to accept his sexuality or express it openly.
Shannon is still angry with Manus for cheating on her and breaking up with her after the accident, so she begins to poison him with artificial hormones in hopes of destroying his liver. However, all the hormones seem to do is make him more docile and philosophic, counterintuitively helping Manus to express his true feelings. Brandy also implies that Manus was the detective who molested her as a teen, providing more insight into Manus’s willingness to enact violence. By the end of the novel, Manus again acts on his sexual desires without consideration for whom he is hurting by doing so when he is sexually intimate with Evie’s fiancé during their wedding. In contrast to Shannon and Brandy, Manus seeks control through harming others, rather than by intentional self-harm.
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By Chuck Palahniuk
