ABSTRACT
A homegrown terrorist cell, led by a fanatic, uses everyday items to destroy a center of fi nancial skyscrapers. A religious fundamentalist hijacks an airplane, not to make demands or take hostages, but in order to crash it for the sake of story, statement, and spectacle. These sentences summarize Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club and Survivor, as well as, of course, the events of September 11, 2001, when nineteen Islamists took control of four airplanes, destroying the World Trade Center and damaging the Pentagon, killing over three thousand people. Like Don DeLillo before him, whose fi ctionalized portrait of the Kennedy assassin, Libra, noted “the tendency of plots to move toward death” (221), Palahniuk’s work demonstrates the disturbing intersections between the multiple meanings of the word “plot”: narrative, conspiratorial, and funereal, the word reminding us of the linguistic connections between our stories, our secrets, and our entombment.
