Palahniuk’s “Guts” is a rollercoaster ride. The first portion of the piece is full
of embarrassing anecdotes of boys trying to “get off.” These masturbation stories, as we learn
from Palahniuk’s essay, are meant to be both funny and scary because they
involve nothing supernatural or even out of the ordinary. These boys are using household things
like vegetables, clothing, and pools to explore the limits of
masturbation. Part of the reason
why the first two instances of masturbation are so funny is because we are not
really invested in the characters.
One of them escapes unscathed but carrying with him the embarrassment of
knowing his mother found the carrot, but the other one dies. Why is it that we feel very little for
the boy that dies with a noose around his neck, yet we feel sympathy for
subject of the final story?
I think the
most obvious answer is that the final story is the narrator’s story. What begins as just another day pearl
diving in the swimming pool becomes an incident that would radically alter the
rest of his life. His large
intestines are literally sucked into the pool gutter and he is left trying to
reach the surface for oxygen.
Palahniuk takes a moment of humor – a moment not dissimilar to the ones
that introduced the theme of masturbation – and makes it serious. But the piece does not come off as a
warning to others. How many people
use pool suction mechanisms to masturbate?
I think what
Palahniuk was ultimately trying to accomplish in Guts is to shock people.
The subject matter alone is one that makes most people uncomfortable
(and this, no doubt, plays a role in the humor of the piece but also in the
fainting later on). Is the story
transgressive because the subject matter is so unexplored? Masturbation is not something people
tend to discuss, especially publically, and Palahniuk does so to the
extreme. A boy masturbating while
his mother calls him down for dinner may be funny, but a boy who has to live
the rest of his life watching what he eats because he destroyed his intestinal
track is another.
The style is
informal. Often times the author addresses
the reader in the second person, which seems to implicate the reader in the
story. Are we all guilty of
certain strange masturbation techniques?
Is that what he is getting at?
In addition, the sentence structure is short and choppy. Most paragraphs are no longer than just
a few sentences. This structure
helps control the overall pace of the piece.
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