Week 6

This week I read Lullaby to page 155.

I won't do a plot summary this week because nothing new really happened and I would like to keep my plot summaries shorter compared to those from Invisible Monsters.

I wanted to mention a common thread between what I have read of Palahniuk's writing. I believe that he uses isolationism in his novels frequently. His characters tend to break away from society in drastic sudden ways putting them onto their own new stage separate from the world around them as the stories pan out. Streator in Lullaby loses his family and begins hate the world around him, hating the noise or his neighbors, distracting himself with his model homes, wiping out those who get on his nerve any given day with the culling song. Then he goes on the road with his new dysfunctional makeshift family (Helen, Mona, Oyster) which further disconnects all of them from society. In Invisible Monsters Shannon blows her own face of simply to remove herself from the looking glass the modeling community has put her under. Her brother Shane is kicked out of his house and undergoes a sex change not because he wants to be a woman but simply because he wants to achieve what he believes is the highest form of self-mutilation. I think common language in the books will further describe this. Palahniuk uses a line at the start of Invisible Monsters to describe the wedding homicide scene, "No matter how much you think, you love somebody, you'll step back when a pool of their blood gets too close." (pg. 15). And in Lullaby, "This isn't about love and hate. It's about control. People don't sit down a read a poem to kill their child. They just want the child to sleep. They just want to dominate. No matter how much you love someone, you still want to have your own way." Both of these lines shown Palahnuik's lack of emotional connection with other people in his writing. There are no grand love affairs or passionate relationships. Rather a whole lot of disappointment and isolation.