Masculinity In Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club

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In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club, Palahniuk shows a nameless man struggling to find himself and is clearly unhappy with his life. For instance, he is constantly obsessing over what it takes to become a “man”, and goes to the extreme to get it. It becomes clear that the narrator’s internal battle is his confusion to create his own definition of masculinity and the steps he must take to get there. Palahniuk uses the narrator and Tyler Durden (the narrator’s alter ego) in Fight Club to portray that in order to become masculine you have to contain your emotion, you have to hit rock bottom, and you have to use violence and aggression as your form of release. This paper will discuss and analyze how Palahniuk portrays masculinity and by the end we should ask ourselves when is it all too much?
Traditionally in our culture, masculinity is portrayed through strong men who seem to value nothing but work ethic and appearances. Men that show too much emotion are often considered overly feminine and therefore weak. Men are brought up to believe that containing their emotions is the masculine way to go through life. However, in Fight Club, we are exposed to seeing the narrator cry openly when he goes to the support groups. During the groups he cries and this makes him feel better about his life and his struggle with insomnia. But, he only cries in front of the testicular cancer group because this allows him to maintain his masculinity and manhood in the company of other men. Then there becomes a distraction and a woman named Marla comes along and starts coming to all the meetings too and faking her diseases just like the narrator. This makes him very irritated because he can’t cry in front of her and if he does it will make him look ...

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...they have to be those things in order to be masculine and because of this men go to the extreme to find their own form of masculinity just as we have seen in Fight Club. The narrator ends up in a mental hospital because he tries to kill himself, he has holes in his face, and he has damaged the world around him by making men believe his actions are okay. Palahniuk uses the narrator and his alter ego in Fight Club to portray that in order to become masculine you have to contain your emotion, you have to hit rock bottom, and you have to use violence and aggression as your form of release. Ultimately, Palahniuk is saying masculinity is crazy and can make you insane but he is also poking fun at it because of its affects on the narrator. The question we now have to ask ourselves is when is it all too much and can we convince ourselves that we are okay with who we are?

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