“How much can you know about yourself if you have never been in a fight?” asked Tyler Durden as he pleads to get hit in the face? Notably, the book Fight Club shows the late 20th century man feel emasculate due to how society has evolved overtime, and eventually tries to regain his manhood in a violent and powerful fashion. The unnamed narrator in Fight Club characterizes with these types of men. His alter ego Tyler Durden helps the narrator identify his masculinity and how society has affected it. They both go through a passage of manhood that includes the formation of Fight Club and later on Project Mayhem, the narrator regains his masculinity by brawling strangers, and later on by causing anarchy. Fight Club shows how much empowerment men use to have, and how the loss of that has men feeling less masculine.
First off, the narrator creates his alter ego Tyler Durden, because he realizes what’s amiss with post modern man. According to Andrew Hock Soon Ng, Tyler Durden was conceived to amend what society has committed to men. The narrator witnesses emasculated men when he goes to the testicular cancer support group. The support groups allows for the narrator to have a very emasculate way of releasing his emotions. Fight Club’s narrator also is the victim to the emasculating effect that the support group has on all the men in the group. He hugs and cries it out, and the narrator exhibits emotions of happiness and liberation, “Walking home from the support group, I felt more alive than I’d ever felt.” (22 Fight Club) The positive/ unmanly effect the support groups had on the narrator exposed how comfortable he was with his emasculation. Later on in the book he sub-consciously creates Tyler to not only fix what’s around him, but als...
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...st society and its perceptions. Fight Club displays the post modern man trying to find their manhood. The journey that the narrator and Tyler go through in Fight Club is like a right of passage, with the end goal of trying to achieve the goal of becoming an empowered male.
Works Cited
Soon Ng, Andrew Hock . "Muscular Existentialism in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club." . The International Journal of Existential Literature, 2005. Web. 5 May 2014. .
Boon, Kevin. "Men and Nostalgia for Violence: Culture and Culpability in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club." The Journal of Men's Studies 11.3 (2003): 267-76. Print.
Friday, Krister. ""A Generation of Men Without History": Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom." Postmodern Culture 13.3 (2003): n. pag. Print.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: W.W. Norton, 1996. Print.
Ta, Lynn M. "Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism." Journal Of American Culture 29.3 (2006): 265-277. Humanities Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 14 April 2014.
Chuck Palahniuk wrote an afterword for the paperback edition of Fight Club, in which he indicated that his novel was principally an updated version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “Really, what I was writing was just The Great Gatsby, updated a little. It was ‘apostolic’ fiction – where a surviving apostle tells the story of his hero. There are two men and a woman. And one man, the hero, is shot to death” (Palahniuk 215). Much can be written about the similarities and contrasts between these two novels. In addition to this simple plot similarity, both novels provide powerful social commentary on the state of American culture and the detrimental impact of capitalism on the individual during their respective times. The Great Gatsby was published in the 1920s and Fight Club in the 1990s, giving two similarly written literary snapshots of American society at opposite ends of the twentieth century. The temptation is to analyze and compare these novels in terms of American consumerism at different times, the individual’s quest for self-identity in the increasingly conformist capitalist structure, or to focus on literary aspects, such as character and narrative structure. However, these obvious subjects seem secondary to an overarching thematic similarity.
In Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Tyler Durden is a conformist to society that experienced a personal tragedy which led him to disengage from the societal normality and found an organization known as Fight Club, an underground street fighting competition. Tyler was once an aspiring businessperson. His failure was the cause of his conformity. Tyler then began to work as a security guard, primarily conducting after hour duties. This led him to begin stealing left over human fat to create the ingredients for the manufacture of explosives with the aim of supplementing his income (Schuessler). Here a personal tragedy, specifically failure, led to a behavioural condition known as disengagement. Tyler retracted himself from the typical American societal expectations and rebelled through forms of crime and backlash.
“In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four” (Orwell 250). Winston lives in a time where a set of rules preventing him to be free are imposed on him – the Party defines what freedom is and is not. “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows (Orwell 103)”. Winston expresses his views on The Party within his diary even though he knows it is not accepted by The Party or the Thought Police. The narrator in Fight Club uses fighting as a form of escapism from his anti-consumerist ideologies revealed by his alter-ego, Tyler Durden. “Fuck off with your sofa units and strine green stripe patterns. I say never be complete, I say stop being perfect, I say let’s evolve—let the chips fall where they may. (Fight Club)” Tyler urges the narrator to stop conforming to consumerist-imposed views of perfection and break barriers to evolve. Tyler and the narrator create a medium for people in similar positions to escape from societal bound norms; it is aptly named “Fight Club”. In comparison, both Tyler Durden and the narrator from Fight Club and Winston Smith from 1984 share
“I had to know what Tyler was doing while I was asleep. If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?” (Palahniuk 32). When Tyler is in action, narrator is not contemporaneous in a sense that he is Tyler now. Tyler is someone who doesn’t give any importance to money-oriented world but he indeed believes in the willpower of constructing a classless society. The narrator is insomniac, depressed, and stuck with unexciting job. Chuck’s prominent, pessimistic, radical work, Fight Club, investigates inner self deeper and deeper into personality, identity, and temperament as a chapter goes by. Through his writing, Chuck Palahniuk comments on the inner conflicts, the psychoanalysis of narrator and Tyler Durden, and the Marxist impression of classicism. By not giving any name to a narrator, author wants readers to engage in the novel and associate oneself with the storyline of narrator. The primary subject and focus of the novel, Fight Club, is to comment socially on the seizing of manhood in the simultaneous world. This novel is, collectively, a male representation where only a single woman, Marla Singer, is exemplified. “Tyler said, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can” (46). This phrase is a mere representation of how to start a manly fight club. However, in the novel this scene is written as if two people are physically fighting and splashing blood all over the parking lot, in reality it’s just an initiation of fight club which resides in narrator’s inner self. The concept of this club is that the more one fights, the more one gets sturdier and tougher. It is also a place where one gets to confront his weaknesses and inner deterioration.
Fight Club is a story about the never-ending struggles between classes. The Project Mayhem is formed in an attempt to overthrow the upper class who undermines the lower class. There are a number of scenes in the story, which highlights the struggle between classes. For instance, when Tyler pees in the soup of an upper class person, when he splices pornography into films and the scene when a mechanic takes the unnamed narrator to steal body fat. The characters here do all they can to fight against the upper class people and to get revenge.
Society becomes so rationalized that one must push himself to the extreme in order to feel anything or accomplish anything. The more you fight in the fight club, the tougher and stronger you become. Getting into a fight tests who you are. No one helps you, so you are forced to see your weaknesses. The film celebrates self-destruction and the idea that being on the edge allows you to be beaten because nothing really matters in your life.
In the novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk we are introduced to our narrator, a nameless male who stands atop the Parker-Morris building with a gun pressed to his mouth waiting for the moment when the bombs go off and the building crumbles. Holding the gun to his mouth is Tyler Durden who represents everything the narrator is not. The narrator is a man presumably in his 30's, although it is never stated. He works as a recall campaign coordinator and lives in a condo furnished with the latest furniture. Tyler Durden is none of these things, Tyler Durden works various jobs and sells soap made of human fat. Tyler Durden lives in a dilapidated house with makeshift furnishings and questionable utilities. Tyler Durden is satisfied with his life, unlike our narrator who suffers from chronic insomnia and who often speaks bitterly about the corporate life.
Friday, Krister. ""A Generation of Men Without History": Fight Club, Masculinity, and the Historical Symptom." Project MUSE. 2003.
Teenage films are often thought of films focused on issues such as teen angst, conflict with parents, coming of age, and most notably rebellion. Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause(1955) is one of the first films that could be classified as such. In today’s times, many films that fall into this genre follow the same structure as Rebel without a Cause in that perceptions and activities of youth defy what is considered to be a seemingly more stable adult life. Prior to Rebel Without a Cause, there wasn’t a film that challenged the ideas of masculinity in society and the struggles that teenagers endured in that era, so it is no surprise that the film is considered to be the poster child of youth rebellion in the 1950’s. Ray brings to light a
Throughout Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, masculinity is a reoccurring theme that is present throughout the novel and is directly linked to the creation of Fight Club in the first place. After meeting Tyler Durden, the narrator’s masculinity and outlook on life starts to dramatically change. In result of this change, the theme of masculinity becomes very disastrous throughout the novel very quickly because Palahniuk uses masculinity in order to explain the many problems the consumer driven males may struggle with. In this case, the narrator’s masculinity is constantly in question because of his struggles with insomnia, consumer driven lifestyle, and Marla Singer.
The film ‘Fight Club’ follows, to some degree of accuracy, the archetypal paradigm of the apocalyptic guidelines discussed in English 3910. Specifically the movie mostly deals with the genre of the personal apocalypse. Thus, following suit in relation to such works as ‘Lancelot’, ‘The Violent Bear it away’ and ‘Apocalypse Now’. ‘Fight Club’, essentiality contains the basic premise of these works, that is the purging of one’s identity through extreme measures and crisis; to ultimately arrive at a personal revelation in the end.
Ruddell, Caroline. "Virility and vulnerability, splitting and masculinity in Fight Club: a tale of contemporary male identity issues." Extrapolation 48.3 (2007): 493+. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Dec. 2013.
Fight Club “Its only after we’ve lost everything are we free to do anything”, Tyler Durden as (Brad Pitt) states, among many other lines of contemplation. In Fight Club, a nameless narrator, a typical “everyman,” played as (Edward Norton) is trapped in the world of large corporations, condominium living, and all the money he needs to spend on all the useless stuff he doesn’t need. As Tyler Durden says “The things you own end up owning you.” Fight Club is an edgy film that takes on such topics as consumerism, the feminization of society, manipulation, cultism, Marxist ideology, social norms, dominant culture, and the psychiatric approach of the human id, ego, and super ego. “It is a film that surrealistically describes the status of the American
The narrator is changed by his experience with fight club; his life becomes all about fight club. Fight club becomes the reason for the narrators existence. The narrator experiences a shift in consciousness; in that, he is able to understand more of who he is and what really matters in life through fight clubs trial by fire. Through battle and a mindset of counterculture and a complete expulsion of ...