Outside Reading #1

I am reading Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk. The book opens with the main character, Tender Branson, alone in a large plane, that he hiijacked, with about 5-6 hours worth of fuel left. He has decided to recount his life's story into the plane's black box, before it crashes into the australian outback. He begins by talking about how the newspaper printed a suicide hotline ad with his phone number on it. When people saw the ad they started calling him for advice. When people called he pretended he was a hotline and gave them advice, and often encouraged them to commit suicide. Once the newspaper corrected the mistake he put up flyers with his number on them saying it was a suicide hotline, and he continued what he was doing. I think that Tender enjoys the position of power that he has over the people that call him, in their desperate state of weakness. This is shown clearly through the fact that he put up his own flyers after the newspaper corrected the error. It is disturbing to think that there are people in the world who would find pleasure in telling others to kill themselves, especially when that person has called for them to tell them the opposite. "There's the blast, just a sudden burst of static, and somewhere a receiver clunks to the floor. I'm the last person to talk to him, and I'm back asleep before the ringing in my ear starts to fade" (Palahniuk, 280)*. In this all too disturbing quote, you can see how routine calls like this have become to Branson.

*Note the page number is 280, this is because the page numbers are counting down. This will be covered in a later post.