philosophy superficially and self-indulgently. The opening of Chapter 8 merits an extensive
quotation to show how shallow (and manic) his understanding of the Buddhist concepts he
espouses really are.
Until today, it really pissed me off that I’d become this totally centered Zen
Master and nobody noticed . . . I write little HAIKU things and FAX them around
to everyone. When I pass people in the hall at work I get totally ZEN right in
everyone’s hostile little FACE.
Worker bees can leave
Even drones can fly away
The queen is their slave
You give up all your worldly possessions and your car and go live in a rented
house in the toxic waste part of town where late at night, you can hear Marla and
Tyler in his room, calling each other human butt wipe. (54-55)
There is a lot to be said about this rant. To begin with, a “totally centered Zen Master” would
obviously not be pissed off that no one recognizes them as such. This type of ego-grasping is
utterly antagonistic to Zen. Likewise, there are several instances in the novel where the
narrator minimizes the Zen he purports to embrace by referring, for example, to the haiku he
writes as “little .. . things” he angrily shoots off to people not in an attempt to selflessly foster
their enlightenment, but instead to point back to his own self-purported spiritual superiority. His
use of caps here highlights the anger boiling up within him; it is as if we can hear, Jekyll-andHyde-style, Tyler’s “hostile” voice violently ripping its way through the narrator’s own words.
Interesting too is his use of the second person, which allows him to superficially divest himself
of self, but not so much in the Buddhist sense; rather, it simply enables him to shed the
consumer-driven self in place of becoming a devil-may-care wannabe Zen practitioner. To
distance himself from the misogynistic sex scene he next describes in the novel, the narrator
tells us how Zen he is:
Just by contrast, this makes me the calm little center of the world. Me, with my
punched-out eyes and dried blood in big black crusty stains on my pants. I’m
saying HELLO to everybody at work. HELLO! Look at me. HELLO! I’m so ZEN.
This is BLOOD. This is NOTHING. Hello. Everything is nothing, and it’s so cool to
be ENLIGHTENED. Like me.
10