“The first rule about fight club is you don’t talk about fight club. The second rule about fight club is YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT FIGHT CLUB!” Yeah, we know. Most people have seen the movie, but not everyone knows there is a book. Thankfully, there is, and I get to write about it!!!
A friend of mine was surprised that I liked the book, because I am a pretty average girl, and this book is very much about the male psyche. But it’s also about destruction, and anyone who has ever wanted to tear apart the world and watch it burn can relate to it.
Palahniuk says in the novel that fight club is for a generation of men raised by women. These men have never been in a real fight before, but as soon as Tyler Durden says, “I want you to hit me as hard as you can,” that all changes. Tyler Durden gives men a place to vent their frustrations, to be men, to be able to be animals and beasts, to let loose those surpluses of testosterone. Tyler Durden is chaos, insanity, and destruction personified. And yet, his purpose is a logical one: to make people live.
Tyler’s lessons do take on a semblance to brain-washing. This is evident in the way the Narrator repeats “I know this because Tyler knows this.” Later, this takes on a different significance, but it’s the repetition that drills it into the reader’s brain. That, and Tyler’s projects and homework assignments take control of the men and their lives. It is fascinating how Tyler’s extraordinarily dangerous and destructive homework assignments grew out of pranks that a teen-aged boy would pull. Peeing in banquet food, splicing genitalia into movies, etc. are just immature stunts. But they grow and they fester and they turned into something much more menacing and deadly. The mentality that almost every male has as a teenager morphed so easily into something horrifying.
The destruction in this book is one of the main reasons I liked it. Anyone who has been dissatisfied or disaffected with the world knows exactly how the Narrator feels. To be perfect and content is to be less human. One would like themselves less if they were content. There is a beauty in the dissolution of the world. There is a beauty in insanity, for nothing to make sense, for a return to nature. There is a beauty in fear making people live like they were going to die. There is beauty in nihilism and in having nothing, in being nothing but an entity.
Marla Singer is another example of this destruction. Tyler and the Narrator are attracted to her because she is walking destruction. She tries to kill herself, she lives horribly, she allows herself to be abused, in a sense. Just like the Narrator does. Tyler’s kiss is proof of that.
Palahniuk raises several interesting points about the psychology of man. One I found particularly interesting was his assertion that if you are a white male living in the US then your image of your father is your image of God. Since many of these men grew up without a father, they grew up without a god, and thus they feel abandoned, alone, angry, frustrated, and unloved by everyone.
Fight Club is about the male psyche and its progression into chaos under the right circumstances. Give an abandoned man a leader, and he’ll follow him anywhere. It’s also about the digression of society into anarchy in order to make people live their lives fully. It’s about finding beauty and value and violence, it’s about finding security in manufacturing destruction. It’s a book about man.
