Chuck Palahniuk's Rant Analysis

It could be argued that abjection is incapable of existing without orifices – if that is the case then one need look no further than the full title of Chuck Palahniuk’s Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey. Like Dr. Vaughan, Rant similarly avoids direct narration; Palahniuk puts the novel in an interview style, including dozens of individuals’ perspectives on Buster “Rant” Casey’s life – from lone genocidaire and menace to hero of nighttimers and venom addict. Devotees and adversaries alike note that Rant is eccentric and abnormal – even in terms of their dystopic world. As noted by Field Maloney in his review of Rant, “Demolition Man “ characters like Rant are common subjects because “in the Palahniuk cosmos, salvation – or at least consolation – is always found among the leagues of the disaffected” (Maloney 10). Palahniuk’s

The car crashing aspect of Party Crashing carries a oneness with pain and anxiety that more similarly aligns with Ballard’s celebration of an identity at risk, walking the abject margin between life and death, reiterated when Green Taylor Simms elucidates, “When you’re aboard a motor vehicle, death passes within a finger’s length every few moments. Anytime a vehicle passes mine in the oncoming lanes, I could be subjected to torture more violent and painful than anything the world’s dictators would ever stoop to inflict,” (Palahniuk 170). Normativity is eschewed as a meaningless system for control that attempts to deny the natural abjection of life that includes violence and has no regard for the social and medical restrictions that hope to delay and distance one from the precarious precipice that is the border of life and death; Party Crashing seeks to embrace this borderline as the reality behind the social