ABSTRACT
In 1999, Fred Palahniuk was murdered by his lover’s ex-boyfriend, Dale Shackleford, shortly after the latter was released from prison on sexual abuse charges. With Shackleford on trial, Chuck Palahniuk was asked to help decide whether or not his father’s killer should receive the death penalty. Completed a month before Shackleford’s conviction, Palahniuk’s fi fth novel Lullaby (2002) is a complex meditation on the moral relationship between voice and politics. Written in his trademark deadpan style, Lullaby wrestles particularly with the diffi cult question of who ultimately has the right to speak in the name of justice. Palahniuk locates the core of this ethical problem in the unstable act of narration, as indicated in the novel’s opening, in which the protagonist, Carl Streator, launches into a philosophical meditation about how form changes the nature of the story being told: “The problem with every story is you tell it after the fact. . . . Another problem is the teller. The who, what, where, when, and why of the reporter. The media bias. How the messenger shapes the facts. . . . How the presentation is everything” (L 7). Following a similar pattern to Palahniuk’s earlier fi ction, this remark is self-refl exive, for at this stage the reader does not know that Streator is the narrator, nor that the italicized passages represent a shift in time from past to present, nor even that “Carl Streator” is a pseudonym adopted by the protagonist out of legal necessity. The centrality of the problem of voice for Palahniuk comes from its inextricable connection to the act of judgment, since the form of a story, in the way it selects, emphasizes, and omits certain facts and details, unavoidably expresses a political vision of the world.
