Abstract:
It has been a long-held belief in literary scholarship that identification with a fictional
character is evoked by the extent to which a reader considers him or herself similar to that
character. This is especially true if a character is considered "good", which implies that the
character holds and acts upon the same norms and values upheld by the reader. This,
however, fails to explain the phenomenal popularity in recent years of that morally dubious
protagonist, the antihero.
The belief that a shared morality is necessary for identification is ubiquitous in the field of
identification theory, an academic endeavour focusing on understanding reader and
audience engagement with fiction. The key focus of the scholarly part of this dissertation is to
find answers to the popularity of the antihero within the text and consider it against the
broader backdrop of individual and societal morality. It does so by employing the tools put
forward by identification theory, in this case, a linguistic cues framework that seeks to
identify textual drivers that foster identification between reader and protagonist.
In order to personify the “antihero” for the purposes of this study, I turn to author Chuck
Palahniuk who is famous for his deviant characters and the almost cult-like status they
achieve. At the centre of the study is the literary character, Victor Mancini, from the novel
Choke, by Palahniuk. Another factor that makes Palahniuk’s writing suitable for textual
analysis is his transgressive writing style, a style lauded by some and dismissed by others.
Using the linguistic cues framework, I strive to identify and isolate Palahniuk's devices and
linguistic structures in his construction of Mancini. This is done along six dimensions:
spatiotemporal, perspective, moral, cognitive, emotional, and embodied.
The fiction part of the dissertation, titled Betwixt, puts some of the findings from the
scholarly section into action. The main character, Leda, starts out as a cowardly individual
with questionable morals who spends her life trying to escape the legacy of a chaotic
4
childhood. Her escape, however, comes in a form she would never have expected. The fiction
attempts to blend the realistic world with the supernatural one - both being complex, layered
and rather messy. We follow Leda's hero-journey, meet lovers, dysfunctional family members
and other characters who shape Leda through their interactions. The litmus test being, can
she find purchase in the hearts of readers despite her many moral failings?
