Chuck Palahniuk, born 1962 into a seemingly functional lifestyle, has made a name in the literary world over the last decade by magnifying the many facets of the human habits of dysfunction. After his first published novel, Fight Club, made waves in 1999, Palahniuk went on to take the fiction world by storm with novels such as Diary, Lullaby, Invisible Monsters, and several others, solidifying a reputation “as a skilled writer who continues to keep his readers uncomfortable” (“Chuck Palahniuk”). The author has also published two nonfiction works, but it is his fiction’s raw cynicism and his inability to be assigned to a genre that has made Palahniuk the success he is today. By many accounts, he struggled to find a path throughout his young life, holding jobs as everything from a dish washer to a movie projectionist, before finding success and sanity in the process of writing professionally (“Chuck Palahniuk”). Palahniuk’s ability to combine the intellectual and political with the disgusting, graphic, and degrading is what sets his writing apart from other satirists of the current literary scene. For example, in Haunted he uses a reality show gone wrong to create a picture of the shallow human condition. Similarly, in Invisible Monsters the reader follows the story of a former model, Shannon McFarland, who is missing the lower half of her face and a beautiful male-to-female transvestite, Brandy Alexander, as they make their way across the country to confront Shannon’s former best friend. Invisible Monsters was Palahniuk’s fictional depiction of the nonfiction world of the fashion industry and the impact it has on self image (“Chuck Palahniuk”). In this essay, I will be discussing Palahniuk’s least satirical fiction work, Lull...
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Fight Club is a novel written by Chuck Palahniuk. This is a story about a protagonist who struggles with insomnia. An anonymous character suffering from recurring insomnia due to the stress brought about by his job is introduced to the reader. He visits a doctor who later sends him to visit a support group for testicular cancer victims, and this helps him in alleviating his insomnia. However, his insomnia returns after he meets Marla Singer. Later on, the narrator meets Tyler Durden, and they together establish a fight club. They continue fighting until they attract crowds of people interested in the fight club. Fight club is a story that shows the struggles between the upper class and lower class people. The upper class people here undermine the working class people by considering them as cockroaches. In addition, Palahniuk explores the theme of destruction throughout the book whereby the characters destroy their lives, body, building and the history of their town.
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