Before the events of the novel begin, Shannon McFarland is a beautiful model with a handsome fiancé and gorgeous best friend. However, Shannon feels ignored by her parents, abandoned by her only sibling, and feels her beauty holds her back in intellectual and social ways because of the assumptions others make about her. Shannon no longer wants to be beautiful. She wants to redefine herself and become something different; thus, she responds to this desire in a very drastic way. She shoots herself in the face and causes the loss of a large portion of her bottom jaw. After her injury, Shannon discovers many truths about the people around her, seeming to prove that her beauty both distracted her from the truth and allowed others to be deceptive with her. Only in changing her looks is Shannon able to come to terms with the identities of those around her, begin to define her own identity, and to develop self-acceptance. Shannon’s character arc is echoed in several other characters in the novel, and through these repeated dynamics Palahniuk suggests that agency over one’s identity is essential to self-acceptance and self-actualization.

Palahniuk’s exploration of agency is complicated by his portrayal of agency through destructive, rather than constructive, acts.