Fight Club

Introduction

Fight Club is amazing novel, one I have read again and again and again. Palahniuk forces breaths to be held from beginning to end, and inspires the reader to think about their own way of life by showing how by simply meeting someone who can make us think, this way can be completely changed.

Climax, Characters and Theme

In the text, the main character (the Narrator) is lead to discover his personal being, as well as a number of things in the world around him. (Palahniuk, 34-48) Firstly, he discovers that his life angers him, and is constantly looking for a way to escape his boring job; he also discovers that his possessions seem to have some control over him. The Narrator has insomnia and nothing seems to cure him, except for when he discovers the support groups for people with terminal diseases (testicular cancer, brain parasites, blood parasites etc.) after this he is able to get to sleep. He then finds Tyler Durden or, rather, Tyler Durden finds him. The Narrator wants Tyler to help him "hit bottom", to rid himself of all possessions so he can search inside himself past all the commercialism and discover his true self. The biggest moment of discovery in this text is when the Narrator discovers the Tyler, the man he has gotten to know the past couple of years, is really a figment of his own imagination. The Narrator discovers the reason he invented Tyler is because he needed someone to help him "hit bottom" because he couldn't do it by himself. Tyler just turns out to be a different part of the Narrator's brain, the part that wants him to be free.

Fight Club is the story of an unnamed narrator, an insomniac yuppie who spends his days helping insurance companies get out of having to pay their claims (Palahniuk, 12-26). He wanders through a meaningless life until he discovers the emotional release of attending therapy groups for people suffering from various deadly (and rather embarrassing) diseases all of which the narrator pretends to have. When the arrival of another "faker" (the wonderfully dark Marla Singer, whose role is far less central in the book than in the film), the narrator finds even the shallow comfort of testicular cancer self-help groups has been taken away from him. Luckily for him, he happens to meet Tyler Durden around this time. And it is Tyler who introduces him to the concept of fighting. What starts as a few rounds in a bar parking lot soon transforms into the nationwide movement known as Fight Club. Every night, yuppies gather together and proceed to beat each other up and get in touch with the pure destructive instinct that society has forced them to suppress. From this violent but relatively benign concept, Tyler sets out to build up an even more extreme movement and our narrator finds his own life suddenly spiralling out of control. To go into any greater details would be unfair to those who have seen ...