| Group Interpretations of Fight Club
Kimberly Balega Erin Warholm-Wohlenhaus Meagan Nice Meagan Albers By examining the binary opposition and the ideologies they represent in the Palahniuk’s “Fight Club” we will prove that the text is inherently undecidable in the way that it contradicts itself. The binary oppositions which we will be focusing on are capitalism vs. socialism, chaos vs. order, anonymity vs. identity, and personal enlightenment vs. social enlightenment. We will examine each of binaries separately by focusing on specific examples from the text and showing how these examples illustrate the undecidability of the text. Destroying all of the narrator’s possessions, blowing up a number of buildings, and glorifying minimum wage jobs the author seems to promote a number of socialist ideas. The character of Tyler Durden even blatantly advocates the futilities of materialistic possessions by claiming that you don’t own your possessions but that they own you and that “you are not your sad little wallet”. However, the text contradicts itself when Tyler/narrator creates the Paper Street Soap Company, illustrating the necessity of money . “At this time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves,” says the author. The binary of chaos vs. order is best shown by the creation of Project Mayhem which was made for the one purpose of disruption and chaos but is described as a very organized military movement. The author seems to believe that chaos can only be created out of order and that truth must be found in chaos. “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.” Tyler Durden constantly preaches on the fact that everyone is similar and that there is no one extraordinary or different person. However, Tyler is always reminding the members of fight club that he is the figure head and the maker of fight club, also he is such a singular and unique personality that he even breaks through another, less extraordinary, personality. The book advocates personal enlightenment by saying that individually each person much hit bottom to truly rise or transcend their old self. However, Fight Club was invented in order for mass numbers of people to come together and grow in a group. Also, In conclusion the book “Fight Club” contradicts itself by openly advocating certain morals and yet the characters within the book perform opposite to these morals which the book claims to uphold. Emily Caruso Allison Roth Jessie Wilkinson Winga Chow Deconstruction Fight Club: A Possible Essay You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cars and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need….We have to show [them] freedom by enslaving them... There are several ways to critically analyze a novel such as Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. For this particular essay, the deconstructive lens has been chosen as the focus of analysis. According to Tyson, “deconstruction asks us to look at the sentence’s ambiguities, even when the sentence seems, at first glance, clear and specific…” (244) Explained in this manner, deconstructionism seems to be the perfect critical lens under which to view Palahniuk’s novel as many of the phrases in the text appear to self-deconstruct ( an example would be the opening quote). Throughout Fight Club, several themes are presented to the reader. The themes that are being focused on here are those of consumerism vs. anti-consumerism and that of individuality. One of the main reasons Tyler Durdan creates fight club and subsequently, Project Mayhem, is to teach people that consumerism is destructive. As the opening statement suggests, we are all merely puppets dangled on a string of mass consumerism. Another main theme presented in the text is that of the group vs. individuality. The non-individuals of Project Mayhem (because they don’t have names in Project Mayhem; their individuality no longer exists), follow Fight Club is a novel containing many themes. A select few were chosen because they best fight the deconstructive lens. Viewing the aforementioned themes in this new light allowed for greater insight to be gained from the novel. On this note, we end with another quote the followers of deconstructive theory might enjoy, “Only after disaster can we be resurrected. It’s only after you’ve lost everything…that you’re free to do anything.” (Palahniuk 61)
Carmen Schatz Jessica Fischer The Constant Carl Jung was a student of Freud who developed his own psychoanalytical theories. Jungian theory of personality equilibrium and individuation can be applied to Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club through its characters. The nameless narrator in the story can be characterized as having the persona of the Dr. Jekyll / Mr. Hyde archetype. In both stories, the alter-personalities are trying to outwit each other in order to become the dominant personality. Both Mr. Hyde and Tyler Durden represent the shadows of their other identity. In Fight Club, the narrator represents Dr. Jekyll, the typical American male, looking for financial success, stability, and individuation. Whereas, Tyler Durden represents the Mr. Hyde character; he is reckless, primitive, and cares about his own survival. Both Tyler and Dr. Jekyll went through the “hero’s journey”. The “hero’s journey” as explained by Joseph Campbell, is when the characters go through the stages of exile, initiation, and return. The exile is when their lives are solid and they not very individualistic – they blend in with the crowd. The narrator was at this stage when he was working his office job and living in his concrete condominium. The initiation occurs when the characters meet their alter-personality, their regular lives start coming apart, and they start to become different then everybody else. The narrator goes through this when he moves into The characters can be analyzed through Jung’s system of type and type functions. The narrator is introverted and represents the conscious and ego. We have examined the characters of the novel Fight Club through Jungian’s theory of personality equilibrium. We have explored the text by the Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde archetype, the hero’s journey, and Jungian’s system of type and type functions ultimately showing the dynamic growth of the characters involved. The narrator, Tyler, and Marla are continually battling to achieve personality equilibrium and individuation.
Kalie Olson Brandon Hall The Dream of Fight Club Through the constantly interrupted plot it is clear that Fight Club operates as a narrative frame closely related to a dream. Analyzing the text through a Freudian Psychoanalytic lens, the dream of the narrator can interpreted in more than one way. Each character created in the narrator’s dream embodies distinct unconscious desires of the narrator himself. The first of these creations is Tyler Durden. The narrator is able to escape his safe, consumer driven lifestyle through The narrator’s second creation is Marla Singer. Marla acts as the Superego portion of the unconscious by representing society’s views of the narrator’s actions. The narrator alienates her and society as a whole from his true self and allows her access to his created alter ego as a defense mechanism. In comparison with Freudian psychology describes dreams as the desires of the unconscious and posits that both the manifest content and latent content are worthy of exploration. The manifest content of the narrator’s dream consists of the characters and plot explained by the author. The latent content is the underlying message relayed through the manifest content. In the story of Fight Club the latent content focuses on the theme of personal enlightenment through destruction. The continuous display of physical violence is representative of the emotional damage of the narrator. The reference to his family and the dysfunctional life he has lived constructs a foundation for the alternate reality he creates. Fight Club easily lends itself to a Freudian Psychoanalytic read and has a wealth of examples for each aspect of this theory. By viewing the text as a dream the narrator’s views of himself and his created world can be explored. The character development becomes more of the narrator’s views of himself than reliable information about other people. By constructing his own reality the narrator is able to protect himself from the parts of his personality or unconscious that he is afraid to face. This false sense of security helps to further the dream by detaching the narrator from the actions of the other characters. His alienation results in the extreme actions of both the conscious and unconscious.
Luke Armstrong Jeff Morris Jessica Mammenga 1) Intro: i) Guiding Question: How does Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club show the workings of a counter culture underneath the radar of an overbearing and, in the eyes of the counter culture, oppressive society? ii) Thesis: Chuck Palahniuk presents a counter culture that’s oppressed by the dominant, overbearing consumer culture, and the result is the counter culture violently acts out against the consumer culture through illegal acts instead of simply trying to reform the dominant culture. 2) Body: a) Discontent with consumer culture leads to creation of counter culture: i) The narrator tells a tale of lower middle class urban men who are waking up from a dream and realizing that all of the tales of the American dream and perfection they were fed as children are not going to come true: (1) at first, Tyler and friends are content beating each other up at fight clubs as a way to express their discontent with the dominant culture: (a) pg. 42: “You aren’t alive anywhere like you’re alive at fight club. When it’s you and one other guy under that one light in the middle of all those watching. Fight Club isn’t about winning or losing fights. Fight club isn’t about words…There’s hysterical shouting in tongues like at church, and when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved.” (b) pg. 43: “…but Tyler explained it all, about not wanting to die without any scars about being tired of watching only professionals fight, and wanting to know more about himself.” b) Eventually, the fight clubs are not enough for Tyler and his followers, and their actions eventually culminate in an attempt to completely destroy the dominant culture in place and start anew. The counter culture that has been created with the fight clubs is further molded into an all-out attempt to restart civilization.
i)
The counter culture is not just something that goes against the ideals of the dominant culture, but it is working to completely destroy the culture as a whole: pg 116: “This was the goal of Project Mayhem, (1) The dominant culture is based on thousands of years of civilization, and the current culture feels like a consecutive stream of events, but the common culture wants to just start anew ; pg. 115: “This is my world, my world, and those ancient people are dead.”
(2)
pg: 115: “I wanted to burn the Louvre. I’d do the
ii)
Even the fight clubs change because the men at them began to realize the implications of what they are doing. The fight clubs turn into a type of recruitment for (1) Fight Club isn’t about fighting another person; it’s about cathartically releasing all of the tension that the current culture imposes on the middle class, the individuals who will never reach the upper class. The tension arises because since they cannot have all of these beautiful things they were told they could have, the alternative is to just destroy them.
(2)
pg: 114: “ (3) pg: 141: “You have a class of young strong men and women, and they want to give their lives to something. Advertising has these people chasing cares and clothes they don’t need. Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t really need.” 3) Conclusion: The way the narrator presents the culture in Fight Club, it is not able to be reformed; therefore it must be destroyed in order for the lower and middle classes to break free from the chains of neo-slavery imposed upon them by the dominant culture.
Samantha Erdmann Abi Gaugert Ben Austinson Trevor Mathew Shearing the Balls of Capitalism Marxism is based on the belief that economic power motivates all social and political activities, and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club shows the repressive ideologies that prevent us from being aware of our socioeconomic conditions. However, these criticisms are pushed too far and the message is lost. Fight Club functions as a critique of capitalist ideology by showing how damaging it is to allow our possessions to define us, but fails to completely subvert capitalism because of its extreme radical perspective. Consumer culture is a major part of the capitalist ideology, and Fight Club subverts this by using possessions as a negative force: “Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you’re trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you” (34). This shows how we are characterized by our possessions, and they oppress us. Jack is lost without them, and fight club is his replacement. The commodification of people is also present: “I don’t want Marla, and Another way the novel promotes a Marxist agendum is through portrayal of the proletarian struggle: “[…] human sacrifices were made on a hill above a river. Thousands of people. Listen to me. The sacrifices were made and the bodies were burned on a pyre […] Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice,’ The fight club itself is an example of a Marxist community because social roles are erased-- if one is a CEO of a major corporation or a mail-boy, it doesn’t matter: “As long as you’re at fight club, you’re not how much money you’ve got in the bank. You’re not your job. You’re not your family, and you’re not who you tell yourself” (135). Project Mayhem also strips away individual identities – everyone is identical. The community matters more than the individual. One of the ways in which the novel unintentionally supports capitalism is through Through the excessive anti-Capitalist actions and propaganda, it is clear that this book functions as a Marxist critique. The evidence presented, though clearly anti-Capitalist, is almost too radical to be taken seriously; this combined with
Melissa Tarasenko Twana Weiler Laura Griffin Lindsey Bachmann The Search for Identity: A New Critical Analysis of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club New Criticism analyzes the universal theme of a text. The New Critical approach examines various elements of the work, such as characters and images, to determine how each element supports the text’s overall theme. In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, one universal theme is the search for the identity. We will demonstrate this theme through an analysis of the narrator, the main character who remains nameless. At the beginning of the novel, the narrator has no individuality. He can be characterized as an “every man.” The actions of the narrator in the beginning of the novel reflect his lack of identity. He is very passive. He is simply a slave to his job, which involves no real physical work, and he basically lives out of a suitcase as he travels from city to city. He is not given an identity of his own. He is not given a name. There is no mention of family or friends that he associates himself with. The narrator seems to be living in a vacuum. In terms of imagery, the narrator’s physical appearance is fairly mundane—he usually wears white shirts with black pants and a tie. His condo is decorated with IKEA furniture and “clever art,” which are the kind of things he is expected to have, but does not necessarily want. In order to cope with his namelessness, the narrator manifests everything he wants to be in the character of Tyler Durden. In an attempt to create an identity for himself, the narrator’s new identity as In Fight Club, an analysis of the main character through his actions and image suggests that the search for identity is a continuous struggle. In this particular instance, the quest to find a balance between the narrator’s real and ideal selves proved to be too much for him to handle, and he ends up trying to kill himself. From a New Critical perspective, Fight Club is a great piece of literature because its main character demonstrates the universal journey to find one’s identity. Ala Martin
Feminist Analysis of Fight Club: Patriarchy Revealed and Rejected Thesis: Fight Club initially seems to reinforce patriarchy through its depiction of traditional gender roles demonstrated by Tyler Durden and Marla Singer; the main character’s rejection of Tyler Durden at the novel’s conclusion represents the ultimate rejection of patriarchal values. Throughout the novel, Tyler Durden is the embodiment of what it means to be a “man,” thus reinforcing patriarchal ideology. The attractiveness of Tyler’s personality to the main character and others promotes traditional gender roles. Tyler is portrayed as being protective, decisive, rational, as well as physically and mentally strong. He defends his interests—Fight Club, Project Mayhem, and his identity—against anyone who threatens them. For example, “You do not talk about Fight Club/Project Mayhem,” the first two rules of both organizations, illustrate this fact. Tyler also dominates every character he comes into contact with: the narrator, Marla, and the Space Monkeys. This dominance is demonstrated physically by his lye kiss on their hands. Marla Singer, much like Tyler Durden, illustrates traditional gender roles for the majority of Fight Club. Marla is submissive, emotional, and irrational. These characteristics are demonstrated through her relationship(s) with Tyler and the narrator. She allows Tyler to treat her as an object; he uses her only for his own sexual gratification. His disinterest in any other interaction is shown by his refusal to be in the same room as her unless they are knockin’ boots. In contrast, the narrator does not acknowledge the fact that they have slept together. Despite their treatment of her, Marla waits around in hope that another person will love her. The conclusion of the novel contradicts the patriarchal ideology reflected throughout Fight Club; most notably, the narrator’s ultimate rejection of his alter-ego. Because Tyler Durden represents all the values associated with a patriarchal society, the rejection of him, “We have to do something to get rid of Tyler,” undermines patriarchy. Marla’s actions at the end of the novel work in a similar manner. Marla recognizes the difference between Tyler and the narrator, and chooses the narrator, thus rejecting the notion that women are looking for domineering, protective men. The majority of Fight Club reinforces patriarchal ideology, demonstrated primarily through the universal admiration of Tyler Durden. The fact that Tyler is rejected by both the narrator and Marla creates an ending that undermines patriarchal ideology. |