Fight Club (novel)

Fight Club (known as The Fight Club in Spain and as Fight Club in Latin America) is a novel published in 1996 by Chuck Palahniuk, this being his debut.

The plot revolves around an unnamed protagonist struggling with his growing annoyance with consumerism and the changing status of masculinity in American culture. In an attempt to get over her, he starts an underground boxing club as a new form of therapy. The novel was adapted into a film with the same title in 1999 by director David Fincher, which would make the story a phenomenon of popular culture. Due to its popularity, the novel has become the target of much criticism, mainly for its explicit descriptions of violence. Its sequel titled Fight Club 2 was released in comic format in May 2015.

History

When Palahniuk made his first attempt at publishing a novel (Invisible Monsters) the publishers rejected it as too disturbing. This led to work on Fight Club, which she wrote as an attempt to further upset the editor into rejecting her. Palahniuk wrote this story while working for the Freightliner trucking company. 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-length novel, which, contrary to his expectations, the publisher agreed to. willing to publish. Although the original hardcover edition of the book received positive reviews and some awards, it was only for a short time on sale. However, the book found its way to Hollywood, where interest in adapting it for film was growing. It was finally adapted in 1999 by writer Jim Uhls and director David Fincher. The film was a box office flop (although it was #1 in its opening weekend in the United States) and received mixed reviews from critics, but it soon became a cult film after it was released on DVD. (with some of the reviewers changing their opinion as a result of the DVD). As a consequence of this, the original hardcover edition became a collector's item. Two paperback reissues of the novel, one in 1999 and the other in 2004 (the latter with an introduction by Palahniuk on the conception and popularity of the novel). book and film), were made later. This success helped launch Palahniuk's career as a popular novelist, as well as founding a style that would appear in all of the author's subsequent books.

Despite popular belief, Palahniuk was not inspired by any actual fight club to write the novel. The club itself is based on a series of fights Palahniuk was involved in in previous years (mainly one he had while camping). Even though he has mentioned this in many interviews, Palahniuk is still often approached by fans who want to know where the local fight club meets. Palahniuk insists that there is no real, singular organization like the one in the book. He admits however that some fans have mentioned to him that some fight clubs (although much smaller than the one in the novel) exist or have existed before (some long before the writing of the novel).

Many other events in the novel were also based on events Palahniuk himself had experienced. The support groups the narrator attends are based on the support groups the author took the terminally ill to as part of volunteer work he did for a local hospice. 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 arose as a result of stories from various people he had spoken to.This method of combining various stories from various people into novels has become a standard way of writing novels for Palahniuk ever since.

Outside of Palahniuk's personal and professional life, the novel's impact has been felt far and wide. Various individuals in various parts of the United States (and possibly other countries) have organized their own fight clubs based on the one mentioned in the novel. Some of Tyler's pranks in his jobs (such as spoiling food) have been replicated. by fans of the book (although these same jokes existed long before the novel was published, such as adding unsavory footage to commercial films, something Palahniuk borrowed from the Film or Gun hoax). Palahniuk eventually documented this phenomenon in his essay Monkey Think, Monkey Do, which was published in his book Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories, as well as in the introduction to the edition. 2004 paperback Fight Club. read the book.

In addition to movies, a few other adaptations have been attempted. A musical version is being developed by Palahniuk, Fincher and Trent Reznor, and Brad Pitt, who played the role of Tyler Durden in the film, has also expressed interest in participating. A video game loosely based on the film was published in 2004 by Vivendi Universal Games, receiving poor reviews.

Plot Summary

The story revolves around an unnamed narrator who hates his job and the way he lives. The narrator works for an unnamed car manufacturer, arranging repairs for faulty models if and only if the cost of these is less than the total cost of compensation paid to the families of the deceased (reminiscent of the history of car problems). safety and the eventual retirement of the Ford Pinto in the 1970s). At the same time, he is becoming disillusioned with the "nesting instinct" of consumerism that has sucked the life out of him, causing him to define himself as a person based on the furniture, clothing, and other material objects he owns. These two aspects of his life, combined with his frequent business trips across different time zones, disturb him to the point of chronic insomnia.

On the recommendation of his doctor (who doesn't consider his insomnia a serious illness), the narrator attends support groups for men with testicular cancer to see what it's like to really suffer. After finding out that crying in these support groups and hearing emotional testimonials from suffering individuals allows him to sleep at night, he becomes addicted to attending them. At the same time, he befriends a cancer victim named Bob. Although he doesn't actually have any of the illnesses that the other contestants have, he is never caught off guard as a "tourist" until he meets Marla Singer, a woman who also attends support groups without being sick. Her presence "reflects" the "tourism" of the narrator, reminding him that she does not really belong to support groups. This prevents him from being able to cry and therefore causes him to hate Marla. As a result of these two factors, the narrator is again unable to control his insomnia. After a short confrontation, both begin to go to different support groups to avoid meeting again.

Shortly before this incident, her life changes radically after she meets Tyler Durden, a beach artist who has several low-paying night jobs where he can perform mischief. After his confrontation with Marla, the narrator's apartment is destroyed by an explosion, so he asks Tyler if he can stay at his house. Tyler agrees, but asks for a favor: "I want you to hit me as hard as you can." The resulting fight in a bar parking lot attracts more disenchanted men, and a new form of support group, the first "club fight," arises. Fight club becomes a new kind of bare-knuckle therapy, governed by a code of eight rules:

1. Don't talk about the fighting club.
2. Let no partner talk about the fighting club.
3. If someone says enough, flushes or fails, the fight is over.
4. Only two men fight.
5. There'll only be one fight at a time.
6. No shirts, no shoes.
7. Fights will last as long as necessary.
8. If this is your first night at the fighting club, you have to fight.

Meanwhile, Tyler rescues Marla from a suicide attempt and the two embark on an affair that baffles the narrator. Throughout this adventure, Marla is largely unaware of the existence of Fight Club, and completely unaware of the interaction between Tyler and the narrator.

As the fight club's membership grows (and, unknown to the narrator, spreads to other cities across the country), Tyler begins using it to spread his anti-consumerist ideas and recruit members to participate. in increasingly elaborate attacks against US corporations. This idea was originally the narrator's, but Tyler ends up taking control instead. Tyler ends up gathering the most devoted members of the fight club (whom he calls "space monkeys") and forms "Project Mayhem", a sectarian organization that trains as an army to bring down modern civilization. This organization, like the fight club, is governed by some rules:

1. No questions asked.
2. No questions asked.
3. No excuses.
4. Don't lie.
5. You must trust Tyler.

The narrator begins as a loyal participant in Project Mayhem, seeing it as the next step for fight club. However, he becomes annoyed with the increasing destructiveness of his activities after they cause Bob's death.

When the narrator attempts to stop Tyler and his followers, he discovers that he is Tyler, not a separate person but a separate personality from himself. As the narrator fought against his hatred for his job and his consumerist lifestyle, his mind began to form a new personality that was able to escape the problems of his normal life. The last straw causing her mind to break was Marla: when he met her, Tyler was born as a separate personality due to the clash between the narrator's unconscious desire to be with her and her conscious hatred of her. Having come out into the open, Tyler's personality was slowly taking over the narrator's mind, planning to win it over completely by making the narrator's real personality more like his own. The narrator's previous bouts of insomnia had actually been Tyler's personality surfacing, being active whenever the narrator "slept". This allowed Tyler to manipulate the Narrator into helping him create Fight Club: Tyler learned recipes to create explosives when he was in control, and used this knowledge to blow up his apartment.

The narrator also discovers that Tyler plans to blow up several buildings in the center of town with the help of pipe bombs made by Project Mayhem. During these explosions, he plans to die a martyr for Project Mayhem, thus taking the narrator's life with him. Noticing this, the narrator sets out to stop Tyler, even though Tyler is always ahead of him. In his attempts to stop him, he makes peace with Marla (who now considers the narrator her boyfriend) and explains that he is not Tyler Durden. He is eventually forced by Tyler to confront him on the roof of the tallest building in the city, which is about to be destroyed along with the other buildings targeted by Project Mayhem. There, the narrator manages to convince Tyler that he no longer has control over him and that from now on he will be the only one to make decisions for himself. This causes her hallucinations of Tyler to cease, ridding the narrator of the second personality of him forever.

With Tyler gone, the narrator waits for the bombs to explode and kill him. However, the bombs turn out to be faulty due to Tyler using a paraffin recipe that never worked out for the narrator, and thus for Tyler. Still alive and carrying the gun that Tyler used to carry with him, the narrator decides to make the first decision that is truly his: put the gun in his mouth and shoot himself. Some time later, he wakes up in a mental hospital, though he believes that he has died and gone to heaven. There, he regularly receives letters from Marla, who still cares for him. The book ends with the members of Project Mayhem who work at the hospital telling the narrator that his plans to change civilization as we know it are ongoing, and that they are waiting for Tyler to return.

Characters

• The narrator — The protagonist of the novel whose name is never mentioned (although mentioned in the film and in the novel shows his name in a card), pretending to make him a daily character. The story begins with insomnia, and begins to go to support groups for terminally ill patients (pretending that they are dying of such diseases) to sleep at night (after crying in them). Finally, he stops going to them when he founded the fighting club together with Tyler Durden as a method of treating his insomnia and his dislike with consumer culture. Hate towards himself, his mental instability and his violent behavior make him a good example of antihero. Some fans of the film call "Jack" the narrator, referring to a scene in which he reads stories written from the perspective of a man's organs (e.g., "Jack's racket"); the protagonist's dialogues in the official script of the film also use the name "Jack" to refer to it. In addition, some objects of the film's atrezzo (such as a narrator's check) bear the name "Jack Moore", which indicates that the members of the shooting team also thought that that was the narrator's name. The name “Jack” was “Joe” in the novel, and changed in the film to avoid conflicts with the magazine Reader's Digest for its use (the articles read by the narrator were published in it). The narrator The Fight Club set a precedent for the protagonists of the following novels by Palahniuk, especially in the case of male characters, who often share their antiheroic and transgressive behavior.
• Tyler Durden — A first-nihilist with a strong hatred of consumer culture. "Because of its character," Tyler performs several night work where he causes problems in the corresponding companies. He also performs art on the beach to find the “perfection”. He is the co-founder of the fighting club (it was his idea of starting a fight that led him to it). Subsequently, the Mayhem Project began, from which he himself and the other members carried out various attacks against consumerism. The crazy but magnetic Tyler could also be considered an antihero (especially because he and the narrator are technically the same person), although he becomes the antagonist of the novel later in history. In the following novels by Palahniuk there have been few characters like Tyler, although that of Ostra in Nana shares certain similarities.
• Marla Singer — A woman the narrator knows during his assistance to the support groups. The narrator stops receiving the same relief when he warns that Marla is faking his problems exactly like him. After leaving the groups, they meet again when Marla meets Tyler and becomes his lover. In later novels by Palahniuk in which the protagonist is male, there is also a female character similar to Marla. These female characters have helped Palahniuk add romantic themes to their novels.
• Robert Bob Paulson — A man the narrator knows in a support group for testicular cancer patients. Old bodybuilder, Bob lost his testicles for cancer possibly because of the steroids he used to increase his musculature, and had to resort to testosterone injections, which caused the estrogens to increase in his body, causing him to grow large breasts (ginecomastia) and develop a more acute voice. The narrator becomes a friend of Bob and, after leaving the support groups, he finds him again at the fighting club. Bob's death later in history while carrying out a mission for the Mayhem Project causes the narrator to turn against Tyler.

Reasons

At two points in the novel the narrator states that he wants to "wipe his butt with the Mona Lisa" and a mechanic who joins the fight club also repeats this to him in one scene. The motif reflects his desire for chaos, later expressed explicitly in his desire to "destroy something beautiful." Additionally, he mentions at another time that “Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart." University of Calgary literary researcher Paul Kennett claims that this desire for chaos is the result of an Oedipus complex, for all of them (the narrator, Tyler, and the mechanic) show contempt for their parents. This is most clearly stated in the scene where the mechanic appears:

The mechanic says: "If you are a man and a Christian and live in the United States, your father is your ideal of God. And if you never met your father, if your father is leaving or dying or is never home, what do you believe about God?"
[... ]
As Tyler saw it, getting God's attention for being bad was better than not getting any attention. Perhaps God's hatred is better than His indifference.
If you could be the worst enemy of God or anyone, what would you choose?
We are the middle children of God, according to Tyler Durden, without a special place in history or special attentions.
Unless we get the attention of God, we have no hope of condemnation or redemption.
What's worse, hell or nothing?
Only if we get caught and punished we can be saved.
"Love the Louvre," says the mechanic, "and clean your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least God will know your names.

Kennett further argues that Tyler wants to use this chaos to change history so that the "middle children of God" have some historical significance, regardless of whether that significance is "damnation or redemption". figured to their parents, for the judgment of future generations will supersede the judgment of their parents.

After reading stories written from the perspective of the organs of a man named Joe, the narrator begins to use similar expressions to describe his feelings, often replacing the organs with feelings and things involved in his life.

The narrator often repeats the line "I know because Tyler knows." This is used to foreshadow the novel's main plot twist, when 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. His boss is later mentioned as having cornflower-blue eyes. These mentions of the color are the first of many in Palahniuk's books, all containing references to cornflower blue at some point.

Subplots

In the novel, Palahniuk uses the narrator and Tyler to discuss how people in modern society try to give meaning to their lives through commercial culture. Several lines in the novel refer to this lifestyle as meaningless. Palahniuk usually does this by direct methods, but there are also some allegorical references. For example, the narrator, after looking at the contents of his fridge, notes that he has "a house full of spices but no real food."

In addition, a good part of the novel comments on the large number of men in modern society who are dissatisfied with the state of masculinity that exists today. The characters in the novel lament the fact that many of them were raised by their mothers because their fathers abandoned their families or divorced their mothers. As a result, they see themselves as "a generation of men raised by women", with no male role model in their lives to help shape their masculinity. This ties into the theme of anti-consumerism as the men in the novel see their "IKEA instinct to stay at home" as the result of the feminization of men in a matriarchal culture. Some readers and critics have noted how the status of the men in the novel is similar to that of women in modern society, as well as that Palahniuk may also have been writing about the issues of female life.

Maryville University of St. Louis professor Jesse Kavadlo, in an essay in the literary magazine Stirrings Still, asserted that the narrator's opposition to emasculation is a form of projection and that the The problem he is fighting against is himself. He also claims that Palahniuk uses existentialism in the novel to disguise metaphors about feminism and love, thus being able to communicate these concepts in a novel primarily aimed at a male audience.

Palahniuk himself makes a much simpler statement about the novel's theme, declaring that "all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to relate to other people."

Paul Kennett states that because the narrator's fights with Tyler are fights with himself and because he fights with himself in front of his boss at the hotel, the narrator uses the fights as a way to assert himself against his own boss. Kennett claims that these fights are a representation of the effort of the proletarians at the hands of the greater capitalist power and that, by proving capable of having the same power, the narrator thus becomes the one who controls him. Later, when the fight club is formed, all the participants are dressed and groomed alike, allowing them to symbolically fight themselves in the club and gain the same power.

Later on, Kennett says, Tyler begins to feel nostalgic for the patriarchal power that controlled him and creates Project Mayhem to achieve it. Through this proto-fascist power structure, the narrator seeks to learn "under what, or rather, who might have stood in a strong patriarchal system". Through his position as a leader in Project Mayhem, Tyler uses his power to become a " God-Father" to the space monkeys (although by the end of the novel his words carry more power than he has, as evident in the space monkeys' threat to castrate the narrator when he breaks Tyler's orders). According to Kennet, this creates a paradox in which Tyler promotes the idea that men who wish to be released from a controlling father figure only tell themselves so when they have had children and become fathers themselves. The new structure, however, ends when the narrator eliminates Tyler, allowing him to decide for himself how to determine his freedom.

Criticism

While Fight Club has been praised for its insight into contemporary American culture, it has also received criticism from various cultural and academic commentators, much of it revolving around the possibility that the novel promotes misogyny and self-destructive behavior. Some passages in the novel seem to suggest that men have something to gain by shedding their feminine characteristics and indulging in more masculine pursuits. Furthermore, these critics believe that these activities, mainly fighting, are self-destructive. Even more problematic for some is the role of Fight Club in popular culture, since from this role it is easy to deduce that the ideas presented in the novel are influencing the general population. However, there is a lot of polarization on this issue. Supporters of the novel have responded by noting that the narrator ends up rejecting Tyler and fight club and also seems to place a lot of emphasis on developing a more authentic relationship with Marla.

Many critics also called Fight Club homoerotic. Among these were David Denby of The New Yorker and Laura Miller of Salon.com, who used these allegations to discredit Palahniuk. In addition, Robert Alan Brook and Robert Westerfelhaus published Hiding Homoeroticism in Plain View: The Fight Club DVD as Digital Closet) making similar accusations. It is worth noting that all of these accusations were made before Palahniuk publicly acknowledged his homosexuality.

Awards

The novel won the following awards:

• 1997: Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.
• 1997: Award for the best novel Oregon Book.

Sequel

In 2015 Dark Horse Comics began publishing the monthly comic limited series Fight Club 2, written by Chuck Palahniuk and illustrated by Cameron Stewart.

Prequel

The short story Excursion from the collection Make Something Up: Stories You Can't Unread by Chuck Palahniuk serves as a prequel to Fight Club.