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.
Symbols & Motifs
Shannon’s Face
Throughout the novel, Shannon’s physical appearance directly correlates to her sense of self and symbolizes the self-destruction Shannon believes in necessary to reinventing her identity. Shannon’s livelihood stems from her facial beauty: She is successful in modeling only because she is beautiful. Her beauty is such a focus in her life that Shannon often notices very little else but how good she looks on a given day. However, Shannon begins to believe that her beauty is holding her back. She feels as though when people look at her, all they see is her beauty. This is illustrated when she learns that Brandy is undergoing plastic surgeries with the intention to eventually look exactly like her.
Shannon decides to alter her face in order to live a different sort of life, as she no longer wants to be defined by her beauty. Shannon’s gunshot wounds result in the loss of a large portion of her lower jaw, leaving her with a hole in the side of her face. The doctors want to perform plastic surgery to repair the damage, but Shannon refuses. Not only would the surgeries be painful, but there is a possibility they would restore a measure of her appearance, which she does not want. She wants to live a different life in which her face is not beautiful.
Veils and Invisibility
Brandy teaches Shannon how to design and wear veils that will hide her face. After a child calls Shannon a monster in the grocery store, she embraces the veils, finding they turn her into something close to invisible. If people cannot see her face, they do not seem to notice her at all. Shannon spends the majority of the novel wearing these veils, delighted when people she knows do not recognize her.
However, the act of being invisible, especially while under Brandy’s influence, wears on Shannon and contributes to her anger and depression in the months after her accident. She struggles with her identity while wearing these veils, which adds to her anger—the same anger that causes her to plot against her friends. In the end, Shannon decides she wants to start a new, anonymous life in which she no longer needs the veils. At the end of the novel, she leaves her veil at the foot of Brandy’s hospital bed where Brandy is sure to see it and hopefully, understand.
Body-Altering Surgeries
Evie undergoes gender confirmation surgery as a teenager. Brandy is working her way toward gender confirmation surgery and has already had several surgeries to make her appear more stereotypically feminine. While Evie has chosen her surgery because it is something she wanted and believed would give her a better life, Brandy reveals that she chose her surgeries because she wanted a way to mutilate her body. This contrast is controversial and risks undermining the validity of transgender experiences. Palahniuk’s intentionally transgressive portrayal is meant to provocatively pose questions about the relationship between a person’s body and their identity, and how this relationship interacts with the agency to determine how one’s body appears. Shannon’s rejection of plastic surgery presents the inverse of this notion: she enacts agency over her appearance, and therefore her identity, by refusing medical procedures.
Related Titles
By Chuck Palahniuk
