Don't read this if you haven't read Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk or if you ever plan on reading it.
There was a posting on The Cult(www.chuckpalahniuk.net) bulletin board a while back about a theory of what actually happens in the novel Survivor. In the end, Tender Branson leaves a tape recorder to tell his story to the flight recorder and then he parachutes away to find Fertility Hollis and live happily ever after. This is what Chuck Palahniuk did tell us(see Minderbender's w/u). What he doesn't tell us is that most of what Tender Branson confessed into the tape recorder was a lie. It was a lie to clear his name for the murders that he actually did commit. He killed everyone that died in the book and lied about what actually happened. If you read the book closely, you can easily see that this is true.
"Ignore how it feels when the only real talent you have is for hiding the truth"(pg.268). That's exactly what he did by leaving this recorded message. He faked his own death to hide the truth about the events that occurred in the previous year. He knew that a large number of people wanted him dead and would search for him until they had him dead. His only option was to tell his story into the flight recorder as the plane crashed in order to convince those people that he was dead.
The one big piece of evidence I have to back this is that the people who die in the book are the only people that have any knowledge of Tender Branson's past. The caseworker diagnosed Tender as extremely mentally ill, so she had to be taken care of. The members of the church knew all about his childhood. The agent knew about his past and threatened to expose him and, of course, Adam Branson knew everything about Tender. In order for Tender to be a media messiah, he had to erase all knowledge of his past. Is it really a coincidence that both the caseworker and the agent somehow died from an ammonia and bleach mixture? Do you think the pilot of the aircraft would survive if he parachuted over an ocean? Obviously we're dealing with a very sick person here who developed strange beliefs about life and death from growing up in a death cult.