Antiheroes - characters we hate to love : a study of the deviant protagonist in Chuck Palahniuk's Choke

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?