Great Moments

One of my favorite scenes in this book so far is the very beginning scene. This boy and his mother are running away from the police in a stolen bus. They drive it to the edge of a cliff, where the mother has the boy stand in front of the headlights with his shirt off, back facing the cliff wall. He stands there wondering what she is doing, while she traces the outline of his shadow made by the headlights of the bus. The mother starts to tell a story about a beautiful girl in ancient Greece who was in love with a young man who was from another country, but he was forced to go back. The night before he had to go back, the girl bought a lamp and had it display her lover's shadow on the wall. She did this so she would always have a record of how he looked, a document of that moment, their last moment together. When the girl woke up the next day, her lover was gone, but his shadow still remained(Palahniuk 4).

Another great scene in the book is the first time the main character purposefully goes to choke on some food. Before he actually does any choking, he picks out his "target", or who he's going to aim to have save him. He describes how what he does created heroes out of people and makes them feel better about themselves. He says that he does it for that, but also for money. When people save you from choking, it makes them responsible for you. They start to send you money. But he goes into detail about the tracheotomy that someone has to preform in order to save someone from choking in a public place. It's a powerful moment in the book.

A great scene that I really enjoy was the one where the main character is talking to an old lady at his mother's retirement home. The lady believes that he is her older brother who abused her sexually as a kid. She keeps complaining to him, believing that he isn't sorry for what he did to her as a child. The main character decides to take blame for it, using the argument that "if Jesus died for my sins, I guess I could soak up a few for other people" (Palahniuk 61). He says one of the most memorable quotes at this time, "the martyrdom of Saint Me" (Palahniuk 61). He ends up telling the old woman that he did abuse her as a child, and when she questions his sorrow for it, he tells her in a very provocative way that he does feel very sorry for what "he" did. This is a great scene because you begin to see who the main character really is.