Consumerism In Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, Invisible Monsters And Choking

Chuck Palahniuk 's fiction is rich in its content and a challenging material for criticism. Almost all his novels focus on revolt against consumer culture. Ron Riekki says that "Palahniuk 's novels repeatedly take anti-capitalistic stances, mocking corporations, often destroying the symbols of capitalistic enterprise" (89). This chapter is devoted to the Marxist perspective of three of his novels. It handles Fight Club, Invisible Monsters and Choke as a postmodern example of men 's suffering from consumer capitalism. The three novels have common subtitles such as class struggle, alienation and the overdose of consumerism in America. Palahniuk seems to be interested in the culture of consumption. To consume involves feeling alienated and rejected.

In his book Stranger than Fiction: True Stories, Palahniuk explains the similarities between his heroes. He says, "all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with people" (xv). The narrator of Fight Club consumes his soul and the narrator of Invisible Monsters consumes her beauty. Moreover, the protagonist of Choke consumes his