The Victimised Victor: A Study of Parental Alienation in Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke.

Abstract

Chuck Palahniuk, one of the renowned contemporary American novelists has attained much critical acclaim as a writer of fiction. The heterogeneity of themes that he deals with in his compositions makes him a vibrant and conspicuous explorer of diverse American literary themes including the theme of alienation. The novel Choke is a ground breaking novel portraying the struggle and conflict of an individual in essentially chaotic and deteriorating American society. Choke is fourth novel written by Chuck Palahniuk and it was published in 2001. Choke displays a psychologically unstable character who suffers from the disturbing results of a fatherless infancy and an altogether different and disturbed mother-son world. Thus this paper seeks to analyse the causes and consequences of parental alienation encoded in the text.