Just finished reading it and think I might have missed something. Are we to assume he just died in the end? If so, did Fertility know he was going to die and just tried to make him feel better by saying that after he walks away from it they will find a new life together and live happily ever after? Or did she mean she was going to kill herself and they would meet in heaven?
I read the book a while ago and don’t remember it that well, so I can’t help you with the ending. But Googling brought me to this, a petition protesting the possible shelving of a script of “Survivor” due to controversy over the plane-crash black-box content of the narrative.
I’m saving up for “Lullaby,” though.
Yeah, I was always under the impression that Tender Branson died at the end. Basically, the plane crashed in the outback and the book itself is the blackbox recording of his final words. I don’t remember the part about what Fertility said, though, it’s been a while (ironically, I literally finished the book on 9/11).
“Lullaby” is pretty good, too. Same kind of weird deviancy as the others, but with a bit of a supernatural bent.
A suggestion about the ending of the novel for which there’s not direct textual support but at least is possible and makes some sort of sense (and suggested by Palahniuk himself, IIRC) was that
About halfway through his monologue (I believe he goes to the bathroom at one point) he jumps out of the plane and has left a tape recorded copy of his diatribe running right beside the black box.
I’m getting rather fatigued by his constant need to put twists on top of twists in every single one of his books. At some point it stops being shocking.
Definately don’t think this book would make a successful movie. It just doesn’t have the mass appeal potential that “Fight Club” had.
I attended a reading by Chuck Palahniuk earlier this summer, and he stated that he was trying to hint that Tender Branson could’ve survived, but he didn’t want to come right out and spell it out (because if he did, than the crash investigators could’ve made the same inference). He did say there’s some key info on p. 7. What Raygun says sounds plausible.