Term Paper on "Fight Club"

Term Paper 5 pages (1431 words) Sources: 3 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Fight Club written by Chuck Palahniuk in 1996. I have chosen to talk about this particular novel because along with a fascinating plot and a radical look at consumer culture, this book contains a very rich subtext. It is the story of a lonely man who has no friends and is stuck working a job he does not like. One day, the narrator/character meets Tyler Durden, and his entire life changes drastically. Together they start Fight Club, a club where men of different ages and backgrounds meet and fight. Jack becomes increasingly worried about Tyler's new project - Project Mayhem that is supposed to blow up the Parker-Morris building downtown; in the end, he is able to stop the bomb from exploding, and discovers that Tyler is actually a figment of his imagination. Fight Club raises questions about consumer culture, the loss of identity, the emasculation of men in contemporary society, as well as a discussion about the meaning of life and self. Thesis: Physical violence in Fight Club is a means of liberating the individual from a value system that he does not identify with, one that was imposed on him by contemporary culture. Also, this paper looks at how nihilism and existentialism are used throughout the novel as tools of defining the characters and proving the thesis of this paper.

Violence in Fight Club is exterior only in terms of manifestation. In reality, it is directed towards the inside; in this sense, violence becomes a metaphor for radical self-transformation. It is only through punches, blood, lymph and other such details of horrendous physical violence that one is able to be shaken to their very core. In this sense, Palahniuk's unnamed narrator is indeed, fighting the outside world, but above all else, he is fighting himself in an attempt to reform and rebuild his own identity. At a closer look, one can see that the violence in Fight Club is always directed towards the self, and not the outside world (Kavadlo: 5) even if the latter is to blame for the loss of identity and substance. Physical and verbal violence are the means through which the main character, referred to as Jack, along with his alter-ego Tyler Durden, manages to shake his own value system, and ultimately free himself from it. He refuses to accept values and images that are not truly his; his violent quest for self-discovery is actually an attempt to formulate his own system of values: "I am helpless. I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things. My tiny life. My little ***** job. My Swedish furniture." (Palahniuk: 138).

This value system that gives rise to rebellion is largely dictated by the advertising culture which claims that happiness is tied to lifestyle. Jack acknowledges his belonging to this culture when he opens his refrigerator and notices that he has "a house full of condiments and no food" (Palahniuk: 25), an allegory aiming at the emptiness and pointlessness of modern life. The narrator finds himself at adulthood surrounded by IKEA furniture - the symbol of capitalist society, unhappy and lost: "We are the middle children of history, raised by television to believe that someday we'll be millionaires and movie stars and rock stars, but we won't" (Palahniuk: 157).

What Tyler said about being the crap and the slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have" (Palahniuk: 114). Jack's disenchantment with his life and the empty promises of contemporary culture: "I felt trapped. I was too complete. I was too perfect. I wanted a way out of my tiny life." (Palahniuk: 164) are exacerbated when he meets Tyler Durden, who appears to be his exact opposite: aggressive, individualistic, powerful but most of all, nihilistic (Kavadlo: 8): "Recycling and speed limits are bull*****.... They're like someone who quits smoking on his deathbed" (Palahniuk: 116). Tyler has a different approach: he reduces the human condition to its most basic, following Nietzsche's philosophical view according to which "total horror of a universe without truth or principle, good or evil, virtue or vice," a place where we "just are" and "what happens just happens" (Wasiolek: 412; Palahniuk: 207 in Bennett: 76).

There is a strong existentialist influence in Fight Club, expressed mainly through… READ MORE

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