guts

Let me just start off by saying that if I had not been laying in bed while reading Guts, I unquestionably would have fainted too. Palahniuk's first anecdote, about the lost butthole carrot, gave me the idea that Guts was going to be a funny short story because other than a bit of lifelong familial awkwardness, nothing bad really happened to the kid. The second, about the kid who got wax in his bladder while trying to replicate "how the Arabs get off", was still pretty funny to me except for the fact that he didn't get to go to college because of it. Basically, nothing could have prepared me for what happens in the third anecdote of the story. I didn't even know that was possible. In Palahniuk's essay, The Guts Effect, he says that the majority of the people who fainted dropped when they heard the bit about corn and peanuts, but for me it was when my confusion about what was going on lifter after I had to reread the three paragraphs before the corn and peanuts part three times, where he describes the "snake, blue-white and braided with veins" that has attached itself to his asshole. For the rest of the story, I just felt numb and made no effort to conjure up any emotional response to what happened after. I was just too scarred. Palahniuk's style here reminds me of Martin Amis' in Money because he is telling the story from a first person point of view, and manages to do so in a way that, especially in the not okay part, I felt just as thoroughly confused and then panicked about what was happening as the character/real life person (still can't believe this) did when it was happening to them. Similarly, in Money, particularly in the parts where John Self is drunk, I definitely felt like I was in his shoes: wasted, bewildered, interpreting situations 100% the wrong way. This is quite obvious when you think about it, but I also thought it was smart how Palahniuk organized the story to have the three anecdotes in order of severity in order to build up the drama of the story and to keep readers caught up in it.