51 pages • 1 hour read
AnonymousDiary of an Oxygen Thief
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
The narrator talks about how he used to like hurting girls emotionally, specifically about how he watched their eyes, to wait until they were in love with the narrator, and then try to see if he could kill their souls. The narrator talks about how Aisling killed his soul just like he killed the souls of his victims: “Justice was done” (2). The narrator says the guilt set in after he stopped drinking, and speaks of how he ignored girls for five years after joining Alcoholics Anonymous.
The narrator reflects on his drinking problem and how, at first, he refuses to admit that he has one. When he was drinking, he used to get into fights a lotby running his mouth and purposefully taunting large men in bars by questioning their sexuality or mocking their lisps. He remembers moving on to women, so he wouldn’t get beaten to death, and living for the hurt he could cause them. He reflects on his ease of ability to find work as a freelance advertiser, which allowed him to drink copiously, just like everyone else in the business, as well as have a constant supply of women he could torture. He cycles through girls, finding that the more he pushes them away, the stronger they cling to him, which makes him hate them even more. He reflects on how he misses hurting people much more than he misses drinking. He knows that he was trying to communicate his own pain through the pain of others, saying,“‘Hurt people hurt people’” (4).
The narrator reflects on the process he used to hurt women, pretending to be nervous and shaking, although the shaking was from alcohol withdrawal. He charms the women with this schoolboy act and secretly gets plastered on these dates. He gets the women to confide in him, not caring if he gets laid or not, pretending to listen so that they invest more in him. He reflects on how he made his face mimic what normal people feel: “I’d watch people in conversations and record their facial expressions” (6).
The narrator reflects on how he felt better about himself when he hurt women, and that the women would try to hide how much he hurt them: wardrobe designer Sophie; a girl who never calls him back, whose name he does not remember; Jenny, who throws a beer in his face; Emily, who he falls for because she does the same thing to him; Laura, whose daughter guilts him into walking her to school; and Penelope, “the one who started it all” (6).
The narrator reflects on his relationship with Penelope, or Pen, apologizing to her because he did love her but had grown tired of her. He begins to despise her for not telling him what she thought of him. One Friday night, he gets incredibly drunk and meets up with Pen at another bar, asking her about how he can ruin their relationship, which she ignores. He tells her that her blouse looks like a tablecloth; they drink more and go to another bar, where he begins checking out other girls. She sees him and ignores him. He fantasizes about “having sex with that white-skinned, blue-veined prostitute with only one breast” (10), knowing this image will cripple Pen. He talks about feeling numb and decides to hurt Pen, in order to feel something. He tells her that he is bored by her conversations and has pretended to be in love with her and that she is witty, just so he can get laid, changing his face and behavior with each statement. She is suspicious, no longer ignoring his bizarre behavior but is still silent, and he is surprised to see she is not crying.
He tells her he’s going to destroy them tonight and begins to talk about how she has a loose vagina and sagging breasts, so that he thinks of other girls to maintain an erection. He tells her he’s cheated on her more than he already told her about. He asks if she’s had enough, and she nods. He says he’s done worse things, but he’ll spare her the details. He then asks about “her job and her blouse and her life” (14).
He worries about losing her entirely, so he gives her ways to exact revenge on him, in order to keep her in his life: calling his house without saying anything every night, going away for a weekend with a guy at the office, stalking him. He continues to insult her and later falls off his bike, although she leaves the door open for him and he climbs into bed with her, knowing that she is crying. The next morning, he watches her get dressed and she looks at him with disgust. She goes away with the guy from her office and he is surprised at how much this hurts.
Someone—he assumes Pen—calls every night for two weeks, not saying anything into the phone. The narrator drinks more and breaks his wrist riding his bike between a motorcycle and a car. He believes Pen is responsible for orchestrating this and imagines her helping him pee and then masturbating him in a nurse’s uniform. He believes she disguises herself as a prospective roommate to check in on him.
Chapter 1 Analysis
The first chapter serves to introduce the nature of the narrator, whom the audience is definitively not intended to like. Through the narrator’s own admissions about his relationships, the audience sees what kind of a person he is because the entire narrative is entirely about the narrator. The narrator stars as the protagonist within his own mind, and the audience is subjected to his entirely subjective perception of events and reality. The audience gets a feel for now narcissistic the narrator is, as well as the paranoia that arises because of this narcissism. As such, the audience is skeptical at whether to trust or believe anything that the narrator says, perpetually wondering if this diary exists merely as the delusions of a paranoid narcissist.
At some point, however, the audience realizes that this attempt to ascertain truth and/or subjectivity is not important to the narrative and must content themselves with riding out the narrative, as it were. In this way, the audience also becomes a kind of victim to the narrator himself, as the audience is forced to acknowledge the lack of agency in the trajectory of the novel. Of course, this is the case for all novels, as the audience is subject to the whims and fantasies of the narrator and/or the author. However, due to the subject matter, the audience feels this lack of agency much more poignantly. The audience becomes frustrated with this limbo of unknowing, much in the same way that the women, who are the narrator’s victims, find frustration and hurt in the way in which the narrator leaves them. The audience feels the helplessness of these women precisely because the audience is in a similar position to these women. However, the empathy that arises out of this positionality is not a motivation for the narrator. Rather, his viewpoint remains as solipsist as ever.
The first chapter largely details the narrator’s relationships—one-sided though they may be—with various women, especially concerning how the narrator purposefully goes out of his way to inflict emotional trauma upon these women. Like all narcissists, the narrator rationalizes this behavior by speaking about his own emotional trauma, as though his own psychological pain were justification enough for him hurting other people. He also goes on to blame his alcoholism, failing to take responsibility for his actions, apart from Pen, to whom he does apologize. Throughout the first chapter, the narrator attempts to mitigate how horrible his behavior was by introducing the idea of karma; that is, he suggests that because he got emotionally crippled by a girl later, the audience should not place too much importance on the terrible things he has done in his past. Rather, this idea places the impetus for this novel as a reflection of how badly the narrator believes he has been hurt, and not as a reflection upon his own past actions.
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By Anonymous
