Fight Club, Week One

Oh, sweet, sweet Fight Club how I love thee! Here is what we're talking about in week one:

1) In Ch. 5, the unnamed narrator explains "how I came to live with Tyler" (40). The explanation involves confiscated luggage and, with many a detour to dildos, the destruction of his home by a blast of unknown origin. He says, "Home was a condominium on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise, a sort of filing cabinet for widows and young professionals" (41).

He goes into great detail about the construction of the condo and its furnishings. The tone of this description and its content are very important. What is the description like? What does it contain? What is the significance of these details and the tone in which we are told about them? That is, what is the narrator's attitude toward them and why are we given these particular details?

Could we get a more cynical tone, please? The first thing to note about this apartment is how neatly separated it is from anyone or anything else. Sure, other people live there, but there is "a foot of concrete floor, ceiling, and wall between me and any adjacent stereo or turned-up television" (41). Everything about the interior is stale, fake, and made to model what the narrator believes is supposed to be the life and apartment of someone getting along well in the world.

IKEA has become the deity of the hegemony, and if he can simply fill his living space with enough of these idols, he too can be a part of the successful mainstream. And so, every last piece of furniture is what the furniture bible tells him he should want. As the people who look at porn figure that this is the sex they want, now that IKEA catalogs have replaced the porn (43), it is all too easy to see that these are the items you should want. And so, like a good little follower desperate for an identity, the narrator clings to the identity that the world has told him he should have. The more he could fill his space with the things from the catalog, the more he would know who he was, the happier he would be.

But yet, he, like his apartment was empty. He lived in "a house full of condiments and no real food" (45) and every piece of furniture he has is mass produced, just "a copy of a copy of a copy" (21). He realizes that he has become "a slave to [his] nesting instinct" (43) but yet, because the world says this is how to find fulfillment, he seeks it.

After his apartment blows up and all of his idols and gods have been destroyed, he prays to a new god for salvation - Tyler Durden. "Oh, Tyler, please rescue me... Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete" (46). The narrator has just taken the first step toward learning the lesson that Tyler and Fight Club will set out to teach him - "It's only after you've lost everything that you're free to do anything" (70).

2) Among the many interesting points in Ch. 6 is this statement: "What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women" (50). How do you interpret this and why? What else does it seem to connect to or explain in these first few chapters of the novel?

"What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women" (50) and so these men must look for answers and look for role models to determine what they should become. The narrator only really had his father for six years, and then he went off to "set up a franchise" (50) elsewhere. After turning to his father in later years for advice and not getting anywhere, only to eventually be told to get married, the narrator muses: "I am a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer I need" (51).

Without male role models, the author never came into manhood. He didn't know what it was to be a man, and so Tyler comes along to show him - Fight Club comes along to show him. And while it is showing him, it starts showing these other boys what it is to be a man. They find life there, they find meaning there, they find their masculinity there in a way they have never found it before - not through the lens of what magazines or pop culture tell them it should be, but on their own terms.

"The gyms you go to are crowded with guys trying to look like men, as if being a man means looking the way a sculptor or an art director says" (50). And while the men of fight club aren't trying to chisel themselves out of allegiance to the hegemony, they still make drastic physical changes to their bodies: "You see a guy come to fight club for the first time, and his ass is a loaf of white bread. You see this same guy here six months later, and he looks carved out of wood... fight club isn't about looking good... when you wake up Sunday afternoon you feel saved" (51).

The idea that "maybe we didn't need a father to complete ourselves" (54) comes out of fight club and it comes once they realize that "maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves" (52). When they stop looking to the outside world for the answers, when they stop laying down and just taking what the world gives them and crying over the lack of their fathers, they find that they "aren't alive anywhere like [they're] alive at fight club" (51).

And so, the narrator stops crying into the warm, twisted safety of Bob's "bitch tits", which have replaced his mother, he turns to himself and to Tyler to find what he was missing from his absent father and from the rest of the world. He finds manhood through fight club - through fighting his demons and becoming someone else for a while, because after all, "who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world" (49).

3) This is the place to raise other questions or make other comments about the first 125 pp. of this novel. What do you find curious? Inexplicable? Incredible? What have we not discussed elsewhere that you want to throw into the mix? If you want to be sure it gets covered, bring it on!

Just two quick things I want to bring up before I forget about them - both are regarding Palahniuk's writing style.

1) The narrator sucks us right into this. The reader is constantly addressed head on "You drill the holes wrong and the gun will blow off your hand" (11). "You wake up at Air Harbor International" (25). "You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life" (44). "You're in a rented house on Paper Street" (77). "What you have to know is that Marla is still alive" (108).

Anyone reading the book is there. You can't not be there. You can't escape it. The narrator is bringing you along, talking directly to you. And if you're a young man, perhaps one of the generation of men raised by women (50), you will find yourself in the pages of this book as you are watching your peers do the same thing. You are there with the narrator, and Tyler, and Bob... you have to be, don't you? After all, the narrator sees you - he is talking to you.

2) Throughout the entire novel, Palahniuk blurs the lines of time, space, memory, and reality in much the same way Junot Diaz talks about doing in the quote we responded to last week. While there is dialogue and there is usage of quotation marks throughout the book, there are a plethora of places that none appear. "I say, Niagara Falls. The Nile River..." (80). Sure, he says the words "I say" so we know he's talking, but there are not quotes. Perhaps this is all a dream, perhaps it is memory. Perhaps it is just "Tyler's words coming out of my mouth" (98) and so it is unclear if quotation marks should be there. Perhaps when everything is so far away and just a copy of something else, it is impossible to tell who is really saying what and when.

Just a neat parallel between the stylizing of Palahniuk and Diaz that grabbed me this time around.