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.
Themes
Identity, Self-Destruction, and Self-Acceptance
Before the events of the novel begin, Shannon McFarland is a beautiful model with a handsome fiancé and gorgeous best friend. However, Shannon feels ignored by her parents, abandoned by her only sibling, and feels her beauty holds her back in intellectual and social ways because of the assumptions others make about her. Shannon no longer wants to be beautiful. She wants to redefine herself and become something different; thus, she responds to this desire in a very drastic way. She shoots herself in the face and causes the loss of a large portion of her bottom jaw. After her injury, Shannon discovers many truths about the people around her, seeming to prove that her beauty both distracted her from the truth and allowed others to be deceptive with her. Only in changing her looks is Shannon able to come to terms with the identities of those around her, begin to define her own identity, and to develop self-acceptance. Shannon’s character arc is echoed in several other characters in the novel, and through these repeated dynamics Palahniuk suggests that agency over one’s identity is essential to self-acceptance and self-actualization.
Palahniuk’s exploration of agency is complicated by his portrayal of agency through destructive, rather than constructive, acts. Shannon causes physical harm to herself in order to regain a sense of control; this is a dangerous and unhealthy mode of thinking that Palahniuk includes to be intentionally controversial and suggest a relationship between destruction and regeneration. Similarly, Brandy intentionally burns her face as a teenager and undergoes extensive plastic surgery in an effort to control how others perceive her. Brandy resists all labels of identity, claiming no particular sexuality and rejecting conventional notions of gender. Brandy’s successful—if controversial—reclamation of identity at first frustrates Shannon, but as she learns more about her and Brandy’s shared experiences, Shannon embraces Brandy’s philosophy that the destruction of a previous self empowers an individual to self-determine a new identity.
Palahniuk offers contrast in the character of Evie Cottrell, a transgender woman who is secretly friends with both McFarland siblings. Evie’s gender confirmation surgery is portrayed as an act of constructive agency over her own identity, and challenges the McFarland siblings’ notion that self-actualization requires the violent end of one’s previous public image. Evie is the only person in the book who is both confident in her identity and who embraces self-acceptance.
The Lasting Impact of Childhood Trauma
Through the adult dilemmas and identity crises of his main characters, Palahniuk explores the lasting impact that childhood trauma can have on identity.
Shannon’s insecurity despite her conventional beauty and dissatisfaction with her sense of self are deeply rooted in her parent’s obvious preference for her sibling. The McFarland parents are darkly comedic in their favoritism, even forgetting Shannon’s birthday in their performative grief for their supposedly deceased child. Shannon’s internalized feelings of neglect motivate not only her desire for self-reinvention, but her desire for revenge against those she feels deceive or betray her. Shannon becomes obsessed with the idea that Manus and Evie need to be punished for their affair, putting into action several plans to hurt them. Shannon poisons Manus with female hormones and blackmails Evie for the insurance money for a house Shannon herself burned down. When Shannon learns her true relationship to Brandy, she becomes focused on the idea that everything that she feels is wrong in her life is because of Brandy, and begins to plot Brandy’s death, as well. This obsession comes to a head when Shannon thinks she sets up Evie to shoot Brandy. However, the truth comes out after this shooting and Shannon comes to realize that both she and Brandy are victims of their parents’ cruelty. In the end, Shannon gives Brandy the gift of her identity while she goes away to find a new identity of her own, finally moving beyond the sphere of influence of her childhood experiences.
Brandy’s experiences mirror Shannon’s: Unable to receive acknowledgement of her true self from the McFarlands, Brandy completely rejects her previous family relationships and personal identity. Brandy’s sexual assault as a teenager also informs her relationship to her body and her sexual identity, and Brandy’s self-destructive impulses are presented as an attempt to regain control over her body after experiencing abuse from Manus and abandonment by her parents. Both McFarland siblings pursue recovery through actions of self-harm unable to catalyze the healing they seek. Ultimately, it is their efforts to rebuild, not to destroy, that empower them to move on from the past and define futures unencumbered by the influence of their parents.
The Toxicity of Conventional Beauty Standards
The harm done by conventional beauty standards is most often explored from the perspective of individuals who feel pressure to conform, or insecurity when they are unable to meet unfair societal expectations. Palahniuk subverts this dynamic through Shannon, who is convinced her beauty is holding her back.
Before the events of the novel, Shannon is a conventionally beautiful woman who uses her looks to make money in her career as a model. However, Shannon recognizes she is unhealthily obsessed with her own beauty, to the point that it’s interfering with her self-determination. She also understands that others judge her by her beauty and that this holds her back in certain circumstances, as some people underestimate her intelligence and abilities. Shannon’s desire to change this motivates her act of self-harm; Shannon aims to free herself from the pressures of conventional beauty by making conventional beauty unattainable for herself.
Brandy, too, focuses on her superficial beauty, undergoing multiple surgeries to achieve her desired appearance: Shannon’s appearance before her injuries. Brandy’s obsession with attaining the appearance that Shannon goes to extreme measures to destroy emphasizes the siblings’ mutual jealousy, and reinforces the harmful nature of societal beauty standards. Brandy believes beauty will bring her status and power; Shannon’s lived experience is that it will not. .
The pressure to attain conventional beauty can define a person’s self-worth and heavily influence a person’s actions and emotions. In fact, Brandy’s focus on appearance is so intense that even suffering from a gunshot wound, her first concern is how flat her hair will be if she dies on the floor. This novel examines the obsession with beauty to both illustrate how destructive this obsession can be, and to suggest there might be other markers by which society can (and perhaps should) measure beauty.
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