Fight Club, a brief analysis
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is a cult classic novel about an underground society whose members attempt to tear down the social structures of their world through guerilla-style mischief and chaos. The narrator, who is never named, is driven to understand the role he plays in society and the responsibility he has to the world around him through his relationship to his companion, Tyler Durden. As their relationship progresses, Palahniuk deftly takes the narrator on a journey of realizing he has been a complicit contributor to a flawed system, acknowledging that change is needed, and taking action. Although the narrator’s primary antagonist appears to be his society, the actual antagonist is Tyler Durden, and the opposing force he must break away from is the rules and structures of Project Mayhem, a rigid encapsulation of Durden’s ideas.
The story is about freeing oneself from societal systems. Tyler Durden is the initial catalyst for change because he encourages the narrator to quietly rebel against the unspoken social contracts in his life. In truth, Durden is not a liberator but an embodiment of another system in which the narrator becomes deeply enmeshed. Although Durden’s way of life seems freeing, it is actually more structured and hierarchical than the previous system. Durden envelopes the narrator into his worldview by differentiating between his and society’s ideas of masculinity. To him, Western society emasculates men and makes them soft, pliable and servile. His idea of masculinity is raw, virile and animalistic. Through the themes of masculinity, Palahniuk portrays the narrator’s fluctuating identity within both these systems.
The story opens with the narrator wrapped in Bob’s arms at a testicular cancer support group, “Remaining Men Together”. With phrases like “too much estrogen”, “bitch tits” and “sobs, sobs, sobs”, Palahniuk paints a strong image of waning masculinity. He is careful not to liken this to weakness and instead shows that masculinity is fragile. It can slip through one’s fingers and be irrevocably lost through no fault of one’s own. The terminally ill characters, Bob and Chloe, succumb to their fate and feel powerless to do anything in the same way the narrator feels powerless in his own life. Instead of contemplating a change — a new job, a new home, a new city — the narrator resigns to his life and apathetically goes through the motions of maintaining his existence. However, everything changes when he meets Tyler Durden.
Durden represents a new perspective. As the narrator develops a deeper relationship with Durden, he gains courage to rebel against his job, his boss and his way of life. Although the narrator is freeing himself from society’s idea of what a man is, he is buying further into Durden’s idea. Durden takes the mass accepted view of masculinity — men who beat on each other in football or get jacked at the gym — and introduces the narrator to a raw, visceral idea of manhood. This new image of what a man is involves fights, blood pooled on a concrete floor, unhealed holes in cheeks, bruised eyes and being present with that feeling of being alive. Through the rules of Fight Club, sanctity and brotherhood are also implicit in this idea thus showing the initial skeleton of Durden’s system.
As the narrator buys into Durden’s worldview, he embraces that self-destruction — not enlightenment — is the answer. He finally sees that he has been complicit in a system that does not fulfill him, so he seeks to change that. Palahniuk marks the narrator’s transition from one system to another through the imagery of cleanliness and filth. As the narrator straddles the two worlds, the imagery of each seeps into the other.
This motif is most present in the description of the narrator’s apartment and the house on Paper Street. Palahniuk introduces Paper Street as a direct contrast to the narrator’s previous, unsoiled life. It is decrepit, sagging, wet and swelling. Even the act of making soap in the house feels filthy and squalid. They use human fat stolen from biomedical facilities, boil it, skim it, and treat this part of the human body in an irreverent way as though bodies itself are expendable.
Palahniuk also marks this overlap by the presence of grit and grime in clean places. The narrator shows up to work with dried blood on his pants, stitches in his cheek and black eyes. Other members of Fight Club also begin to show up to their “normal” lives with visible signs of their fights. Even seemingly untouchable places like the dinner parties, where the highest echelons of society congregate, becomes tainted with urine in the soup, snot on the trout and hepatitis bugs in the Rum Custard Charlotte Russe. The contradictory lives are converging.
The author uses this overlap to mark the change in the narrator’s view of the world. He is separating himself from his older way of living, and he is buying into Durden’s ideas of how to live. At this point, Palahniuk intentionally equates the bruises and cuts with quiet signs of strength and freedom. The chipped teeth and black eyes are always accompanied by the characters’ sense of joy and proprietorship that they feel over their lives. Although they seem to grow more defiant, they are actually becoming more servile to Tyler Durden. Their devotion to him grows stronger as well as their adherence to his idea of how men should exist in the world. With each action, they unconsciously submit to a new behavioral contract Durden established.
Durden’s new system feels benign and even childish until two events occur. Paper Street becomes ground zero for Project Mayhem, and Bob dies. Paper Street’s quick transformation into a guerilla planning base marks the drastic change from Durden’s idea being a concept into being an actual, structured system. It feels rigid, and it is no longer a choice to go along with his idea of masculinity. Although the narrator does not want to take part in Project Mayhem, he also does not escape it or stop it. To him, the whole operation is harmless, and he can remain a bystander — until Bob dies.
Bob’s death becomes the actual catalyst for the narrator realizing that he does not want to be a part of the new system Durden created. To him, Durden’s way of life no longer symbolizes strength and defiance; it symbolizes recklessness, negligence and death. He finds himself face to face with mortality and feels powerless in its presence the same way he felt powerless in his life before Durden. With Bob’s death, the narrator realizes that Durden’s idea of impenetrability and invulnerability is false. The men are as fragile, vulnerable and soft as the human body is. The narrator understands that he can no longer be complicit in Durden’s actions, and he must do something to stop Project Mayhem.
The narrator’s initial attempts to thwart Durden are futile. He attempts to resist or stop Project Mayhem, but the plan is so air-tight, the fail-safes so thorough, that he achieves nothing. Instead, he finds himself sucked in — another cog in the wheel — and he is as powerless to break away as the space monkeys are. The revelation that the narrator and Durden are one and the same is climactic and brilliantly hinted at throughout the book. However, it does absolutely nothing in helping the narrator control Durden’s actions. He literally gets relegated to a backseat viewer. He smells the gasoline on his hands and knows he is responsible for blowing up his office, but he cannot do anything about it. He remembers the details of Patrick Madden’s death, knows he did it but has no way of preventing other murders. His efforts to thwart Durden’s impenetrable system fails, and he finally realizes he must stop Durden himself.
Ironically, the narrator works for the “Compliance and Liability” division of his company. Through this title, Palahniuk hints to the readers the narrator’s dual role in the chaos that was created. As himself, he was compliant in Tyler Durden’s actions — never stopping him or getting in his way. However, as Tyler Durden he was wholly and completely liable for the chaos, harm and death that ensued from Project Mayhem.
At this point, Tyler Durden has become another social structure in the narrator’s life. Only when he accepts responsibility for his actions and the impact on others can he truly break away from the oppressive and impenetrable system Durden created. In accepting that he and Durden are the same, he realizes that the only way to stop him is to kill both himself and Durden. The narrator shoots himself and finally frees himself from the control of Tyler Durden. He has broken away from every system in his life, and he is finally free.
At least that’s how the narrator would like to feel. Palahniuk chooses a different take away — one that is more ominous. Instead of feeling empowered, he retreats from society. He relinquishes all responsibility for his role in the world, and he chooses not to engage with any part of society: its systems or its beliefs. For the narrator, there is no redemption. He does not win; he simply withdraws altogether. Moreover, Palahniuk hints that the withdrawal is too late. Durden’s actions have already started to ripple. Paper Street has been cleared out, implying that Project Mayhem has been fully released into the world. In the narrator’s “heaven” he occasionally encounters a black eye or swollen stitches. Worse, in his withdrawn state, he still hears people call him “Mr. Durden”. Despite choosing to no longer be a part of the world, the narrator has already had an irreversible effect on it, and he cannot rescind what was created.
The last lines of the novel drive home Palahniuk’s real lesson: taking responsibility for one’s own life is not enough. Breaking out of a system is not enough. Freeing oneself is not enough. Instead, one must acknowledge that every idea, even one as simple as punching someone behind a bar, can ripple out. Every idea can grow stronger, take hold in others and spread — becoming larger and larger until it fully consume the little piece that formed it.
