|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Fight Club[1] (1996) is the first published novel by American author Chuck Palahniuk. The plot is based around an unnamed protagonist who struggles with his growing discomfort with consumerism and changes in the state of masculinity in American culture. In an attempt to overcome this, he creates an underground fighting club as a radical form of psychotherapy. It was made into a movie of the same name in 1999 by director David Fincher. The movie became a pop culture phenomenon. In the wake of the film's popularity, the novel has become a target of criticism, mainly for its explicit depictions of violence.
HistoryWhen Palahniuk made his first attempt at publishing a novel (Invisible Monsters) publishers rejected it for being too disturbing. This led him to work on Fight Club, which he wrote as an attempt to disturb the publisher even more for rejecting him. Palahniuk wrote this story while working for Freightliner. After initially publishing it as a short story (which became chapter 6 of the novel) in the compilation Pursuit of Happiness, Palahniuk expanded it into a full novel, which, contrary to what he expected, the publisher was willing to publish.[2] While the original, hardcover edition of the book received positive reviews and some awards, it had a short shelf life. Nevertheless, the book had made its way to Hollywood, where interest in adapting it to film was growing. It was eventually adapted in 1999 by screenwriter Jim Uhls and director David Fincher. The film was a box office disappointment (although it was #1 at the U.S. box office in its first weekend) and critical reaction was mostly favourable, but a cult following soon emerged as the DVD of the film was popular upon release. As a result of the film, the original hardcover edition became a collector's item.[3] This film is now widely considered to be a defining work and an uncompromising critique of humanity's loss of identity through mass consumerism. Two paperback rereleases of the novel, one in 1999 and the other in 2004 (the latter of which begins with an introduction by the author about the conception and popularity of both the novel and the movie), were later made. This success helped launch Palahniuk's career as a popular novelist, as well as establish a writing style that would appear in many of his future novels.
Many other events in the novel were also based on events that Palahniuk himself had experienced. The support groups that the narrator attends are based on support groups to which the author brought terminally ill people as part of a volunteer job he did for a local hospital. Project Mayhem is loosely based on the Cacophony Society, of which Palahniuk is a member. Various events and characters are based on friends of the author. Other events came as a result of stories told to him by various people he had talked to.[5] This method of combining various stories from various people into novels has become a common way of writing novels for Palahniuk ever since. Outside of Palahniuk's professional and personal life, the novel's impact has been felt elsewhere. Several individuals in various locations of the United States (and possibly in other countries), ranging from teenagers to people in technical careers, have set up their own fight clubs based on the one mentioned in the novel.[6] Some of Tyler's on-the-job pranks (such as food tampering) have been repeated by fans of the book (although these same pranks existed well before the novel was published). Palahniuk eventually documented this phenomenon in his essay "Monkey Think, Monkey Do",[7] which was published in his book Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories, as well as in the introduction to the 2004 paperback edition of Fight Club. Other fans of the book have been inspired to non-anti-social activity as well; Palahniuk has claimed that fans tell him that they have been inspired to go back to college after reading the book.[2] Other than the film, a few other adaptations have been attempted. In 2004 Fight Club was in development as a musical, developed by Palahniuk, Fincher, and Trent Reznor.[8] Brad Pitt, who played the role of Tyler Durden in the film, expressed interest in being involved. A video game loosely based on the film was published by Vivendi Universal Games in 2004, receiving poor reviews from gaming critics. Plot summarySpoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
At the recommendation of his physician (who does not consider his insomnia to be a serious ailment), the narrator goes to a support group for men with testicular cancer to "see what real suffering is like". After finding that crying at these support groups and listening to emotional outpourings from the suffering allows him to sleep at night, he becomes dependent on them. At the same time, he befriends a cancer victim named Bob. Although he does not really suffer from any of the ailments that the other attendants have, he is never caught being a "tourist" until he meets Marla Singer, a woman who also attends support groups for alternative reasons. Her presence reflects the narrator's "tourism", and only reminds him that he doesn't belong at the support groups. He begins to hate Marla for keeping him from crying, and therefore from sleeping. After a short confrontation, they begin going to separate support groups in order to avoid meeting again. Shortly before this incident, his life changes radically after meeting Tyler Durden, a beach artist who works low-paying jobs at night in order to perform deviant behavior on the job. After his confrontation with Marla, the narrator's condo is destroyed by an explosion and he asks Tyler if he can stay at his house. Tyler agrees, but asks for something in return, in a now-famous line: "I want you to hit me as hard as you can."[10] The resulting fight in a bar's parking lot attracts more disenchanted males, and a new form of support group, the first "Fight Club," is born. The fight club becomes a new type of therapy through bare-knuckle fighting, controlled by a set of seven rules (the film expanded the fourth rule into two separate rules):
Meanwhile, Tyler rescues Marla from a suicide attempt and the two initiate an affair that confounds the narrator. Throughout this affair, Marla is mostly unaware of the existence of fight club, and completely unaware of Tyler and the narrator's interaction with one another.[14] As the fight club's membership grows (and, unbeknownst to the narrator, spreads to other cities across the country), Tyler begins to use it to spread anti-consumerist ideas and recruits its members to participate in increasingly elaborate attacks on corporate America. This was originally the narrator's idea, but Tyler takes control from him. Tyler eventually gathers the most devoted fight club members (referred to as "space monkeys") and forms "Project Mayhem", a cult-like organization that trains itself as an army to bring down modern civilization. This organization, like the fight club, is controlled by a set of rules:
The narrator starts off as a loyal participant in Project Mayhem, seeing it as the next step for fight club. However, he becomes uncomfortable with the increasing destructiveness of their activities after it results in the death of Bob. As the narrator endeavors to stop Tyler and his followers, he learns (in a variant of anagnorisis) that he is Tyler[16]; Tyler is not a separate person, but a separate personality. As the narrator struggled with his hatred for his job and his consumerist lifestyle, his mind began to form a new personality that was able to escape from the problems of his normal life. The final straw came when he met Marla; Tyler was truly born as a distinct personality when the narrator's unconscious desire for Marla clashed with his conscious hatred for her. Having come to the surface, Tyler's personality has been slowly taking over the narrator's mind, which he planned to take over completely by making the narrator's real personality more like his. The narrator's bouts of insomnia had actually been Tyler's personality surfacing; Tyler would be active whenever the narrator was "sleeping". This allowed Tyler to manipulate the narrator into helping him create fight club; Tyler learned recipes for creating explosives when he was in control, and used this knowledge to blow up his own condo. The narrator also learns that Tyler plans to blow up the Parker-Morris building (the fictional "tallest building in the world") in the downtown area of the city using homemade bombs created by Project Mayhem. The actual reason for the explosion is to destroy the nearby national museum. During the explosion, Tyler plans to die as a martyr for Project Mayhem, taking the narrator's life as well. Realizing this, the narrator sets out to stop Tyler, although Tyler is always thinking ahead of him. In his attempts to stop Tyler, he makes peace with Marla (who always knew the narrator as Tyler) and explains to her that he is not Tyler Durden. The narrator is eventually forced to confront Tyler on the roof of the building. The narrator is held captive at gunpoint by Tyler, forced to watch the destruction wreaked on the museum by Project Mayhem. Marla comes to the roof with one of the support groups. Tyler vanishes, because “Tyler was [his] hallucination, not hers.” [17] With Tyler gone, the narrator waits for the bomb to explode and kill him. However, the bomb malfunctions because Tyler mixed paraffin into the explosives, which "never, ever works." Still alive and holding the gun that Tyler used to carry on him, the narrator decides to make the first decision that is truly his own: he puts the gun in his mouth and shoots himself. Some time later, he awakens in a mental institution, believing that he is dead and has gone to heaven. The book ends with members of Project Mayhem who work at the institution telling the narrator that their plans still continue, and that they are expecting Tyler to come back. Characters in Fight ClubSpoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.
MotifsAt two points in the novel, the narrator claims he wants to "wipe [his] ass with the Mona Lisa"; a mechanic who joins fight club also repeats this to him in one scene.[19] This motif shows his want for chaos, later explicitly expressed in his want to "destroy something beautiful". Additionally, he mentions at one point that "Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart."[20] University of Calgary literary scholar Paul Kennett claims that this want for chaos is a result of an Oedipus complex, as the narrator, Tyler, and the mechanic all show disdain for their fathers.[21] This is most explicitly stated in the scene that the mechanic appears in:[22] The mechanic says, “If you’re male and you’re Christian and living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God? Kennett further argues that Tyler wants to use this chaos to change history so that "God’s middle children" will have some historical significance, whether or not this significance is "damnation or redemption".[23] This will figuratively return their absent fathers, as judgement by future generations will replace judgement by their fathers. After reading stories written from the perspective of the organs of a man named Joe, the narrator begins using similar quotations to describe his feelings, often replacing organs with feelings and things involved in his life. The narrator often repeats the line "I know this because Tyler knows this." This is used to foreshadow the novel's major plot twist in which Tyler is revealed to be the same person as the narrator. The color cornflower blue first appears as the color of an icon on the narrator's boss's computer.[20] Later, it is mentioned that his boss has eyes of the same color.[24] These mentions of the color are the first of many uses of cornflower blue in Palahniuk's books, which all feature the color at some point in the text. The theme of masculinity is also a motif throughout the book. Different symbols lead to this reoccurring theme, such as violence, and testes. Fighting is perceived as a masculine characteristic. SubtextThroughout the novel, Palahniuk uses the narrator and Tyler to comment on how people in modern society try to find meaning in their lives through commercial culture. Several lines in the novel make reference to this lifestyle as meaningless. Usually Palahniuk delivers this through overt methods, but there are also some allegorical references as well; for instance, the narrator, upon looking at the contents of his refrigerator, notices he has "a house full of condiments and no food."[25] Additionally, much of the novel comments on how many men in modern society have found dissatisfaction with the state of masculinity as it currently exists. The characters of the novel lament the fact that many of them were raised by their mothers because their fathers either abandoned their family or divorced their mothers. As a result, they see themselves as being "a generation of men raised by women,"[26] being without a male role model in their lives to help shape their masculinity. This ties in with the anti-consumer culture theme, as the men in the novel see their "IKEA nesting instinct" as resulting from the feminization of men in a matriarchal culture. Maryville University of St. Louis professor Jesse Kavadlo, in an issue of the literary journal Stirrings Still, claimed that the narrator's opposition to emasculation is a form of projection, and that the problem that he fights is himself.[27] He also claims that Palahniuk uses existentialism in the novel to conceal subtexts of feminism and romance in order to convey these concepts in a novel that is mainly aimed at a male audience.[28] Palahniuk himself gives a much simpler assertion about the theme of the novel, stating "all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people."[29] Paul Kennett claims that, because the narrator's fights with Tyler are fights with himself, and because he fights himself in front of his boss at the hotel, the narrator is using the fights as a way of asserting himself as his own boss. He argues that these fights are a representation of the struggle of the proletarian at the hands of a higher capitalist power, and by asserting himself as capable of having the same power he thus becomes his own master. Later, when fight club is formed, the participants are all dressed and groomed similarly, thus allowing them to symbolically fight themselves at the club and gain the same power.[30] Afterwards, Kennett says, Tyler becomes nostalgic for patriarchical power controlling him, and creates Project Mayhem to achieve this. Through this proto-fascist power structure, the narrator seeks to learn "what, or rather, who, he might have been under a firm patriarchy."[31] Through his position as leader of Project Mayhem, Tyler uses his power to become a "God/Father" to the "space monkeys", who are the other members of Project Mayhem (although by the end of the novel his words hold more power than he does, as is evident in the space monkeys' threat to castrate the narrator when he contradicts Tyler's rule). According to Kennett, this creates a paradox in that Tyler pushes the idea that men who wish to be free from a controlling father-figure are only self-actualized once they have children and become a father themselves.[32] This new structure is, however, ended by the narrator's elimination of Tyler, allowing him to decide for himself how to determine his freedom. Spoilers end here.
Literary significance and criticismWhile Fight Club has been praised for its insights into contemporary American culture, it has also received criticism from various academics and cultural commentators. Much of this surrounds the possibility that the novel promotes misogyny and self-destructive behaviour. Some passages in the novel seem to suggest that men have something to gain by ridding themselves of feminine characteristics and engaging in more masculine activities. Furthermore, these critics believe these activities, mainly fighting, are self-destructive. Even more problematic to some critics is Fight Club 's role in pop culture, as such a role makes it easy to infer that the ideas presented in the novel are influencing the general populace. However, there is much polarization on this issue. Supporters of the novel have responded by noting that the narrator finally rejects Tyler and fight club, and seems to also place great importance on developing a more authentic relationship with Marla. Many critics have also claimed there are homoerotic elements in Fight Club. Amongst these were David Denby of The New Yorker and Laura Miller of Salon.com.[33] Additionally, Robert Alan Brookey and Robert Westerfelhaus published Hiding Homoeroticism in Plain View: The Fight Club DVD as Digital Closet to make similar claims.[34] Fight Club in pop culture
Because of the film's popularity, Fight Club is sometimes referenced in pop culture, having been referred to in television shows, films, music, video games, and other forms of media. Though many references came as a result of the film, the majority of them make reference to elements found in both the novel and the film. AwardsThe novel won the following awards:
Editions
See alsoNotes
References
In addition, the following editions of the novel were used as references for this article:
|
Sites |
Searched sites for "Fight Club" |
|
No sites found. |
Sorry, no matching site records were found. |
Want your site listed here?
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
