Gatsby Fight Club

Natalie Hackett

May, 2014 English Lit

The Great Gatsby and Fight Club: Between Two Hyper-Masculine Narratives in American Capitalist Consumer Culture

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.

Both novels are masculine narratives, where the male protagonists (Jay Gatsby and Tyler Durden), and the narrators (Nick Caraway and an unnamed Narrator) run toward or away from one of two versions of hyper-masculinity. One version is the wild, angry, sexual and raw fighter who uses the brute power of his body to cru...

... middle of paper ...

...wn reading and also from the film adaptation. I don’t know the reason for this, but maybe it has to do with American cultural perceptions of the middle class, IKEA-shopping people being predominantly white, just like smart masterminds of resistance/crime are also perceived as being white.

In the end, both protagonists, Gatsby and Tyler Durden die. We find out later that Tyler Durden and the unnamed Narrator are two different personalities of the same man, so they both die. Their ends are tragic and violent. These men never attain the masculinity or authenticity they chased endlessly. They don’t find peace or even meaning. They don’t seem to ever form truly intimate bonds with other human beings. Their relationship to material wealth consumes them in one way or another, and this is the final conclusion on what American consumer culture does to the individual man.