Terrouge Firebird
Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk revolves around the main character, who is in constant struggle to live his own life, separate from his cult and separate from the life of a celebrity. Throughout the novel, Freud's Id and Superego are in a constant battle in the subconscious of the character even as his Ego portrays an entirely different person as he attempts to create an identity.
When the reader first meets the main character, he has hijacked a plane, let the passengers off, and is now being debriefed by an airline pilot about how long the plane will fly, and what will happen when he runs out of fuel and his engines flame out. The pilot then bails out with his parachute and leaves the main character, Tender Branson, to pursue his objective-to tell his life story before the plane crashes and he meets his inevitable end. At this point, the reader is only 'listening' to the life story via an electronic voice Tender fashioned to leave to the world using a black recording box, which would be the only intact object of the crash. It is while "flying west on autopilot at mach 0.83 or 455 miles per hour....above the clouds at a cruising altitude of 39,000 feet....toward Australia..." that Tender Branson's autobiography begins (Palahniuk 286-285).
Tender Branson's story begins as a young pawn that is among of the last survivors of a Creedish Death Cult. He is stripped of a true identity from birth since he was born second to his twin brother, and he is only given a stock name-Tender-much like the females who only carry the name Biddy. The firstborn son is the only one who will hold a name other than Tender, and he is also the only one allowed to have a wife and make a family. The cult's purpose is to expand as far as they can until God calls, and this includes preparing extraneous members-tenders and biddies-to work in the outside world to bring in income to the church. He and all other members have been programmed to kill themselves when they have heard the main cult has died. However, the government steps in after discovering the main cult dead and does its best to help integrate the remaining survivors into normal society, to give them a purpose and help them live a life they should have freely been able to live. Tender's autobiography begins ten years after the cult was found dead.
Tender Branson revels in talking to desperate people anonymously on his phone. When the paper misprinted the crisis hot-line phone number, he started receiving calls from much of the public on a nightly basis asking for his advice. For the first time in his life he holds a dose of power-the people who call are usually willing to trust his anonymous suggestions. Tender finds his nights amusing as people call him at all hours to spill their problems even as he tells them to pull the trigger, kill themselves. Once, Trevor Hollis calls him with a shotgun under his chin and asks for a reason why he should not kill himself, and Tender only says, "Go ahead. I'm only half awake. It's three in the morning, and I have to work tomorrow. I tell him, Hurry before I fall back asleep, pull the trigger" (Palahniuk 281). How could a person revel in such a distasteful hobby? This power over other people's lives could be blamed on Tender's subconscious or Id, which is described as, "driven by the pleasure principle, which strives for immediate gratification of all desires, wants, and needs. If these needs are not satisfied immediately, the result is a state anxiety or tension" (Van Wagner). Talking to these people over the phone is a way to release much of the tension Tender experiences from being sexually repressed, unable to kill himself, and from never experiencing what it means to hold power. It is an outlet for his Id to tell these people to die, to do something he has wanted, has been programmed to do, since his cult died out.
In Structure of Mind, the Superego is,
This man's Superego and Id battle each other with unusual strength when he is pondering the subject of sex. As men are wont to do, his mind drifts often to the subject, most particularly when he sees a young girl or contemplates his own sexual activity. Quite possibly the most legitimate 40-year-old virgin in the world, he has been programmed to abstain and repress his sexual needs for the Creedish Death Cult. The cult strove to eliminate the sexual desires of their members through fear of pain and death as Adam, Tender's older brother, attempts to explain to him to let Tender finally shrug off the cult's power:[The] last part of the mind to develop. It might be called the moral part of the mind. The Superego becomes an embodiment of parental and societal values. It stores and enforces rules. It constantly strives for perfection, even though this perfection ideal may be quite far from reality or possibility. Its power to enforce rules comes from its ability to create anxiety. (Structure of the Mind)
This desire reaches fever pitch when a girl dubbing herself Fertility Hollis walks into his life. She is the sister of Trevor Hollis who had called Tender with a shotgun under his chin, and she catches Tender stealing fake flowers from Trevor's grave. She calls him later that day knowing it is the same crisis hotline her brother used before he killed himself, and she speaks to Tender of himself. A week after they meet again she calls him again-not knowing that it is Tender-and Tender speaks to her of himself by telling her "?to go screw his brains out and then tell me what it was like," and at the same time, he recognizes he would go to hell for saying that (Palahniuk 200). Despite Tender's Superego constantly warning him that sex is a painful ordeal and that it will likely lead to death, his Id speaks up in the form of his sexually repressed desire.The night my wife had our first child...the elders took all the tenders and biddies in the district and made them watch. My wife screamed just the way they told her. She screamed, and the elders preached and wailed how the wages of sex was death. She screamed, and they made childbirth as painful as they could. She screamed, and the baby died. Our child. She screamed and then she died. (Palahniuk 34)
Tender's life story after the Creedish Death Cult has extinguished itself, and he remains as the last true and surviving member, creates a constant struggle between his Id and his Superego. The Superego, which has dominated his life and has violently held his Id in the subconscious, is finally with his brother and Fertility's encouragement and without the cult looming over him. Despite this weakening of the Superego, he is not turning into a criminal by snatching food whenever he is hungry, but is finally becoming integrated into the societal norm. The third part of psychoanalysis is the Ego, which recognizes reality for its restrictions and freedoms, and acts as the negotiator between the Id and the Superego. While is Id and Superego battle inside of his head his exterior does anything but portray this struggle. The reader is never truly informed of what he is feeling, or what his face is expressing, but if the way he speaks says anything it is that the Ego portrayed to the world, in place of his wild Superego and Id, is dull and emotionless, much like a machine.
Unfortunately, this process of breaking Tender free of the cult is disrupted when the media gets wind of his survival, and an agent pushes him into being the spiritual leader of Christian America. From a simple life of cleaning and catering to a rich couple, Tender is thrown into celebrity and is pushed into being the public's savior and ideal instead of letting him be himself. If his personality before had been dull and mechanical, he is fully transformed into a robot at this point when he says only whatever his agent or teleprompter or scripted text tells him to say. Just as the death cult attempted to censor his thought and actions and speech, so do the agent and many of the people trying to become rich off of his icon. Tender becomes a figurehead, a tool used to speak to the people for compliance while the agent and many other people work to do actions in his name. Tender says it differently at this beginning of his career, "This wasn't a question of whether or not I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone's full attention" (Palahniuk 133). His viewpoint changes swiftly during his first public speech, in front of a crowd that was waiting to hear him speak the gospel truth. He had asked his agent for a gun and some bullets, which he stuffed into his pocket, but as he spoke the lines that had been written for him he began to realize he had been fooled:
Tender could not have killed himself in front of the crowd after such a speech because it would only reveal him as a hypocrite and a fake. His reasons for wanting to kill himself in front of a crowd are not fully clear-he hardly speaks of it more than in a roundabout way-but the fact that he would like to kill himself suggests his programming is so strong, or he is so miserable he feels he needs to pull the trigger, or crash the airplane.The gift of life....is precious....The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter how painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death. This lesson is to the murderer....This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick....I had no idea what I was saying until it was too late. (Palahniuk 129)
Another notorious scheme in his celebrated career was the idea of the pornfill, which Tender's agent made him sign off on before reading it. The idea is to have a landfill where people can throw away the porn so they are not sinning in the eyes of the Lord; all 20,000 acres the Creedish Death Cult had bought and Tender had now inherited are allotted for this, another demonstration of the control his agent exerts over him in the quest for riches. The agent later goes so far as to arrange for Tender to marry someone he does not know because he says Tender's followers cannot relate to someone who has not yet had sex. These many incidents show the reader that Tender is never truly in control of his life, after the cult has died and he is still trying to discover himself.
Ultimately, Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk is a commentary on the balance of Freud's psychoanalytic personality, and finding an identity to stay uncontrolled and free. Slavery from himself is all that Tender has known, and if he had been given the tools-even a sliver of identity-he would have had an easier time controlling his interests and his life. What the reader may have initially read as simply a poor, pathetic soul living a dreadful life, he can now see that Tender is hardly more than a means to an end, never truly finding his own path but always being pulled along by someone else.