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Contemporary Genius or Masculine Fluff?: Examining Fight Club Through the Lens of Four Critical Styles
Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is not known for being a great literary work, but yet it is showing up on a growing number of syllabi for literature and English classes at American universities. From contemporary literature classes to courses on men and masculinity and even philosophy courses, Fight Club is carving out a space in the world of academia. Reading the novel and understanding the vast number of critical theories that can be applied to it easily demonstrates just one of the reasons why the novel is so useful in an academic setting. Using psychoanalytic criticism, feminist theory, New Criticism, and Deconstruction theory to analyze the text demonstrates only a small segment of what Palahniuk’s work is capable of. When considering modern texts to incorporate into the classics that have long been associated with academic settings, it is important to evaluate the flexibility of the work and Fight Club certainly shows itself to be a top contender.
As a novel about “a generation of men raised by women” (Palahniuk 50), Fight Club is ideally suited for psychoanalytic analysis. The narrator of the novel tells us that he knew his father for only six years and that Tyler Durden never knew his father. The narrator identifies that without his father’s guidance which he so desperately wanted, he was unclear of what to do with his life and how to progress into adulthood. “I’m a thirty-year-old boy, and I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer I need,” (Palahniuk 51) he tells us. According to Jacques Lacan, the father is the first authority figure that the child recognizes and represents not only “Law”, but also allows the child to move beyond constant gratification seeking toward an understanding of the limitations and requirements of the real world. This movement from the “pleasure principle” to the “reality principle” is an important development stage according to this theory. Lacan also argues that “identifying with the father now [during early childhood] makes it possible for the [male] child to take on a masculine role and makes it aware for the first time of various forms of insti-tutionalised law” (Carter 943-56). Similarly, in his synopsis of Freudian psychoanalysis, Terry Eagleton states that the male child comes to identify with his father as a representation of the role he will occupy later in life. This place as authority and powerful head of household is what the male child understands will be his when he matures and so he is able to accept that while he is not the patriarch now, he will be when he occupies the role of the father. The child “is thus introduced into the symbolic role of manhood” (Eagleton 155).
When a generation of men is lacking father figures to learn the role of manhood from, they must find someone or something else to substitute in that role. For the narrator in Fight Club and most of the other space monkeys of Project Mayhem, Tyler Durden was their substitute for the initial God-like power that a father should have held. The problem with this is that Tyler never had a father figure either, so it is unclear how accurate his views of manhood, masculinity, and authority really are. His complete lack of father, and thus, lack of Law, explains Tyler’s drive toward anarchy and his disregard for rules and authority figures.
Due in large part to his tendency toward destruction and anarchy, a popular analysis of the text reads Tyler Durden as representative of the Freudian id while the narrator is representative of the ego. In this sense, the narrator enforces the reality principle while Tyler is a reflection of the pleasure principle. Before Tyler’s appearance, the narrator lives in his filing cabinet apartment, works in his office cubicle, and keeps all of his desires for pleasure to a manageable and socially acceptable level. He has, in fact, gone so far as to substitute an urge for IKEA furniture for a sexual urge. As a perfect example of the ego redirecting the impulses of the id, we read “the people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue” (Palahniuk 43). The narrator does an excellent job of living his clean, boring life and keeping himself under control, “however, because he suffers physical symptoms that have an impact on his mental welfare (insomnia), the power of his ego becomes limited. So, the powerful horse that is the id slips its reigns and leads the ego where it (id) wishes to go” (Price 7). This split in Fight Club can actually be read as a product of the narrator’s unresolved Oedipal complex which can cause neurosis or psychosis in which “the link between the ego and the external world is ruptured, and the unconscious begins to build up an alternative, delusional reality” (Eagleton 159). In this case, the delusional reality is Tyler Durden.
Perhaps more interesting is exploring the Oedipus complex as it relates not just to the narrator, but as it connects him to Tyler and Marla Singer. In this situation, the narrator represents the child – he is simultaneously a thirty-year-old boy and “six years old, again, and taking messages back and forth between [his] estranged parents” (Palahniuk 66). The narrator looks to Tyler as a father and, like a child, wants his approval and love. He identifies with Tyler as a male child is meant to identify with his father – he idolizes him, sees him as the ultimate authority, and bases his views of masculinity on this deified man. When Marla and Tyler begin having sex, the conflict begins for the narrator. He sulks: “How could I compete for Tyler’s attention. I am Joe’s Enraged, Inflamed Sense of Rejection” (Palahniuk 60).
Freud’s castration anxiety is clearly recognizable within the narrator as first, Tyler sees a dildo on Marla’s bed side table. This phallus on the table next to her bed is symbolic of her as the castrated mother. She is now recognizable as different, as not having an attached phallus the way that he (and thus, the narrator) does. After this visual symbol, on more than one occasion Marla references animal shelters “where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you” (Palahniuk 68) which highlights the castration anxiety of the child once it accepts that the mother does not have a penis and thus castration is a possibility and something that may be done to him by the father.
As a child who never had an opportunity to resolve his internal Oedipal conflict, it is crucial that the narrator find a way to resolve this triangular relationship. Though in most circumstances, the child must simply accept that he cannot be with his mother and thus transfers his love and sexual desires to other females while identifying with the father, in Fight Club, the narrator is able to have the woman who represents the mother. To resolve his Oedipal conflict, it is imperative that the narrator kill Tyler at the end of the novel. Only by doing so can he bring closure to this psychological interruption that has impacted his entire life and be able to claim the symbolic mother as a prize. Freud claims that “if the boy is unable successfully to overcome the Oedipus complex, he may be sexually incapacitated” (Eagleton 155) and thus, to be with Marla sexually as Tyler was and avoid fear of castration, Tyler must be permanently removed.
The search for masculine role models and identity also relates to a feminist analysis of Fight Club. Applying the theory of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, one can see the struggle that the novel’s characters face when it comes to defining masculinity and manhood. In Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, she famously says “one is not born but becomes a woman” (de Beauvoir 301). In the introduction to her book, de Beauvoir questions how one defines a woman and posits that one would never ask such a question like “what is a man?” because being a man is a privileged state and does not lend itself to questioning. She suggests that women must be questioned and defined because “they have no past, no history, no religion of their own” (de Beavoir xi), but this is true of the men in Fight Club as well. So, if it is true that with this as a condition that women are not born but must become women, then we can explore the possibility that men in Fight Club are not born, but must become men.
As demonstrated in the psychoanalytic analysis, Fight Club explores the lives of men who have been raised without fathers. This is true of more than just the predominant male figures in the novel like “Walter from Microsoft” for whom it is assumed “if his parents weren’t divorced, his father was never home” (Palahniuk 55). In homes without male role models to teach them how to become men, the characters of Fight Club must find ways to create this identity. They search for manhood in their jobs, the furniture, fight club, Tyler Durden, and through destruction.
Bob is perhaps the best example of a man who must become a man, because in his search for manhood, he essentially becomes a woman. Bob was a bodybuilder who took steroids and hormones in an effort to be bigger, stronger, and more manly but “raise the testosterone level too much, your body ups the estrogen to seek a balance” (Palahniuk 17). Trying to be too masculine backfires and turns the body feminine – it causes what the novel refers to as “bitch tits”. Bob is regularly seen in the early pages of the book as the most feminine character in the novel. He has “new sweating tits that hang enormous” (Palahniuk 16), has had his testicles removed due to cancer, and wraps the narrator in his warm, loving arms and holds him as he cries. This feminine, motherly image coupled with the name of the testicular cancer support group Bob is a member of (Remaining Men Together) suggests that he has lost his status as a man.
Fortunately, according to de Beauvoir, “a condition brought about at a certain time can be abolished at some other time” (de Beauvoir x). One of the arguments made be de Beauvoir as to why women remain the inessential Other is because women never actively work to change this condition though it is clear that a condition once created can be destroyed or changed. Though the fatherless men of fight club seem to represent an inessential Other, they seek a way to change this and find fight club. Once Bob discovers fight club he, like so many of the other nameless men in the novel, discovers how to “become a man”. The first time the narrator sees Bob after he has started attending fight club, Bob is smiling rather than crying and has his masculine, muscular physique back. The narrator notices that his “arms come out of his T-shirt sleeves quilted with muscle and so hard they shine” (Palahniuk 100). There is no mention now of Bob’s tits because though he “became a woman”, he was able to change this condition and become a man again.
In Judith Butler’s article “Sex and Gender in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex”, she clearly articulates why all of the men from Remaining Men Together have stopped coming to the support group and started attending fight club instead. The men there were all deeply wounded and found solace in one another because they had all been emasculated. Butler states, “the social constraints upon gender compliance and deviation are so great that most people feel deeply wounded if they are told that they are not really manly or womanly” (Butler 41). These men who have all had their testicles taken away have been made to feel not manly enough. They hold each other and cry – behaviors stereotypically associated with femininity – at the support group, but when they discover fight club, they are not these weak, crying men any more. Suddenly, they can be “a god for ten minutes” (Palahniuk 48-49). This same concept can be seen when the narrator is trying to devise a plan to stay awake all night and stay safe from Project Mayhem. Marla brings up two options that could help him both stay awake and in hiding, but they challenge his manliness and thus, he would rather protect his masculinity than stay alive. “I’m not cross-dressing, and I’m not putting pills up my ass,” (Palahniuk 182) he tells Marla.
Butler further posits in her book Gender Trouble that gender is a social construct and that as individuals we perform our gender. While the novel’s men are busy performing their gender through fight club and later Project Mayhem, it is important to look at the one female character in the novel to understand how she performs gender. Despite being the only character in the novel perceived as a woman, Marla Singer actually performs as far more masculine than feminine.
Marla is an outlaw. She chain smokes, does drugs, steals, jokes about abortion, and lies. She first appears at the testicular cancer support group which consists of “twenty men and only one woman” (Palahniuk 17). Marla never had testicles, and thus it is ironic that she should come to a testicular cancer group with these men, but as she is performing this masculinity, she is accepted in the circle. Despite the fact that “feminists are busily and happily disarticulating the phallus from the penis” (Findlay 470), the dildo on Marla’s table is also an example of her performing masculinity. The phallus is the ultimate symbol or masculinity and manhood so much so that as a female bodied person performing masculinity, Marla has to inform the man in the room that the dildo is “not a threat to [him]” (Palahniuk 61). The dildo had already been proven to make men uncomfortable when the narrator is coming through the airport and is informed that in the case of a vibrating dildo being found in a piece of luggage it is imperative that the staff never refer to a dildo as “your dildo” (Palahniuk 42). The reader is further told that if a vibrating dildo turns on it creates “an emergency situation” (Palahniuk 42).
Until the end of the novel, Marla continues to perform a masculine gender through her emotional distance. At the close of the novel when her actions have made it clear that she loves the narrator, she still insists “it’s not love or anything… but I think I like you” (Palahniuk 205). This lack of willingness to admit to emotion verbally is also a stereotypically masculine behavior and shows Marla’s gender performance as one that does not match her biology. As the only female bodied character that appears in the novel, it is still not clear based on Butler’s argument that one performs a socially constructed gender if the reader can label Marla Singer as Fight Club’s only woman.
This breakdown of gender roles and labels ties in as one of the many conflicts that can be pointed to in an analysis using Deconstruction theory. Jacques Derrida’s linguistically focused approach looks for binary oppositions. These pairs can be seen in everyday life and language and certainly in every text that we read. Things like good/evil, light/dark, singular/plural, masculine/feminine, etc. are common pairings that we use to define our world. As Derrida points out, one part of this pair cannot exist without the other because without both parts, we would have nothing to use as a reference point and could not fully comprehend either half. It is understood that in each of these pairings, one half is always seen as superior to the other. “A deconstructive reading of a text identifies the existence of such hierarchies, reverses them and ultimately demonstrates that neither of the pair of opposites in each case is superior to the other: they are inter-dependent” (Carter 1471-85).
Some of the largest oppositions that exist within Fight Club are salvation/destruction, individuality/conformity, masculine/feminine, life/death, and reality/perception. While the idea behind binary oppositions is that one half must, by default, be superior to the other, there are too many conflicts throughout the pages of Palahniuk’s novel for the reader to walk away with a clear sense of what the superior terms are. In his essay, “The Fiction of Self-destruction: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist”, Jesse Kavadlo argues that “beauty, hope, and romance remain Palahniuk’s central values throughout his seemingly ugly, existential, and nihilistic works” (Kavadlo 3). Kavadlo presents evidence that shows just a few of the ways that Palahniuk’s novel manages to break down its own arguments and ultimately leaves the reader without any understanding of what the point of the story was.
The reader understands that even the characters in Fight Club have an understanding of how oppositions work in Derrida’s theory. Marla herself explains that the reason she started coming to the support groups is that “there was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with” (Palahniuk 38). This basic principle underlies all of Deconstruction theory and must be understood before the breaking down of the oppositions can begin. In the case of this life/death opposition, it is impossible ultimately to understand which the novel is celebrating. Both Marla and the narrator attend the support groups trying to appreciate life more by being so close to death. When it comes to sex, “Marla said she wanted to get pregnant. Marla said she wanted to have Tyler’s abortion” (Palahniuk 59). These clear juxtapositions of life and death already confuse which of the two is superior. Being surrounded by death at the support groups provides the narrator with the ability to sleep peacefully, it provides Marla with a sense that she is not alone. Chloe, though seen as pathetic and unattractive due to her appearance of illness and death is still seen as a pure, positive character which makes death seem appealing emotionally even if not physically. Marla’s pregnancy/abortion statement is seen not as disturbing, but as hot. The idea of creating a life just to kill it is sexualized and seen as positive. When Bob is killed, the narrator is distraught by his death and tries to end Project Mayhem to prevent more deaths, but simultaneously sends the message that “in death we become heroes” (Palahniuk 178).
Similar conflicts exist when it comes to the novel’s arguments around individuality and conformity. In the opening pages of the novel, the narrator talks about his insomnia and how it makes everything “far way, a copy of a copy of a copy” (Palahniuk 21). When describing his apartment and his furnishings, the narrator waxes poetic about IKEA and using these products that everyone now owns as a way to express who he is as an individual. The problem is that “we all have the same Johanneshov armchair… we all have the same Rislampa/Har paper lamps” (Palahniuk 43). Enter fight club, Project Mayhem, and Tyler Durden.
Fight Club is meant to represent a place where the participants are free from the labels and restrictions placed on them by other people. “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… you’re not your name… you’re not your problems… you’re not your age” (Palahniuk 143) is the message provided to the men who join fight club looking to escape these labels in search of some deeper meaning. Though in theory fight club and Project Mayhem exist as a way to rebel against the system, escape this social conformity, and provide a unique sense of belonging to something special, the members of Project Mayhem end up lacking in identity more than they were before they walked in the door. Project Mayhem takes away their name, their hair, their clothes, and their choice. The first two rules of Project Mayhem are “you don’t ask questions” (Palahniuk 122) and thus, just as in the rest of the world, members are asked to stop thinking and simply obey.
The sense of conformity that the members of Project Mayhem end up with is hidden only the slightest bit by their acts of anarchy, the attacks they make against politicians, and the subversive petty crimes they commit. It is almost comically obvious how they have traded one life with no identity for another however when the narrator boards a bus and tries to get away from his nightmare: “From the back of the bus, I can see maybe twenty people sitting between me and the driver. I count the backs of twenty heads. Twenty shaved heads” (Palahniuk 187). These men have traded IKEA for black pants, black t-shirts, and black socks. Aside from Bob, they have no names, and Bob has his name returned only in death. As Project Mayhem spreads around the country, Mark Pettus concisely explains the contradiction that occurs: “Project Mayhem succeeds not only in reproducing itself, but also in reproducing the dominant system it opposes” (Pettus 125).
When it comes to exploring the idea of destruction, Kavadlo explains that “even the trope of self-destruction self-destructs” (20). Though one of the major themes of the novel is self-destruction, it is only in the sense that we must self-destruct in order to survive. This poses a question ideally suited to the deconstructionist: how can we simultaneously self-destruct and self-improve? How can we save ourselves by destroying ourselves? Ultimately, this question is not answered in the novel. It is posited that “only after disaster can we be resurrected” (Palahniuk 70). If it is only in death, and thus after complete self-destruction, that we have names and become heroes, how can we then find salvation?
One important collapse in this argument is that at the end of the text, the destruction itself fails. There is no explosion. The building is not destroyed. The narrator shoots himself in an attempted murder/suicide that seems to destroy Tyler but keep the narrator alive. Though alive, the narrator is trapped in a hospital bed without the resolve to fight hard enough for his own salvation. His self-destruction failed, but his self-improvement also failed.
Worth noting is that at the end of the novel, the reader is still not sure which of the characters is real and which has been imagined. It is largely held that the narrator was there first, is the “real man”, and that Tyler Durden is his mental creation. However, it is important to realize that Tyler Durden has a name, and the narrator was never given one. Nearly everyone who encounters the narrator refers to him as Tyler Durden. Even when the two confront one another in the hotel room, they argue amongst themselves about which is the primary occupant of the body. As the narrator tells himself that Tyler is nothing more than his hallucination, Tyler counters with “fuck that shit… maybe you’re my schizophrenic hallucination” (Palahniuk 168). In Fight Club’s final pages, it is still left open to debate which of the two is laying in the hospital bed and will ultimately emerge as the “real” person. So many of the things cycling through the narrator’s mind still resemble Tyler’s language, people are still walking by calling him Mr. Durden and referring to his plan, and he says both that he died and that Tyler died. “Of course, when I pulled the trigger, I died. Liar. And Tyler died… Faker” (Palahniuk 207).
As the reader finishes the novel, it is clear that not only is this question not answered, but none of the key problems presented has been satisfactorily addressed. The reader is left with far more questions than answers and while it is possible to pull any number of messages from the story and the characters, a closer examination shows that there is no solid message. Everything that the reader is told is contradicted over and over, everything is questioned, nothing is answered. The only consistency that can be found in Fight Club when examined through the lens of Deconstruction is that in its quest for self-destruction, the novel practices self-destruction as well.
Despite this deconstructed interpretation, if one looks at Fight Club and focuses on the approach of New Criticism, it is also possible to highlight ways in which the text is a unified, complete whole. Many themes can be traced throughout the entire novel, the language and structure ties many threads together and can possibly answer some of the questions left open to interpretation by other theories. By examining the text closely, a reader can find meaning where things seemed ambiguous before.
As a minor example of this, consider Tyler’s first profession. He is a projector operator. He changes the reels of film during a movie to make the film appear seamless to the viewer. There are two dots that appear quickly near the end of a reel called “cigarette burns”. These dots serve as a warning – the first dot is a two minute warning and the second dot is the five second warning. An alarm rings to warn the projector that a change is coming up. The cigarette burns indicate that a change is coming. “Changeover. The movie goes on. Nobody in the audience has any idea” (Palahniuk 28). In the next chapter, we meet Marla who is more often than not smoking a cigarette. Marla shows up with her cigarette and the narrator, like the film projectionist, cannot find the distraction that he so desperately wants. Marla’s association with cigarettes ties her to the warning of the cigarette burns in the film reels – change is coming.
In case the reader misses this correlation the first time, the text provides another chance for us when Marla is sitting at the table “burning the inside of her arm with a clove cigarette” (Palahniuk 65). This symbol carries over to at least one other important scene between Tyler and the narrator. When Tyler burns his kiss into the back of the narrator’s hand it is with the warning, “you can cry, but every tear that lands in the lye flakes on your skin will burn a cigarette burn scar” (Palahniuk 76). Tyler’s words during this scene indicate that the act of accepting the pain of the chemical burn will bring about a change in the narrator, but it is this cigarette burn reference that solidifies the idea. It has been established that a cigarette burn is a warning of change. Something is about to change, the story will go on, and the reader won’t have any idea – unless they are paying very close attention and see the dots.
Another ongoing theme that can be traced throughout the novel is time. There are many references from the beginning to the end of the novel to time. The story begins en media res and from the third page of the novel, the first countdown begins – “we’re down to our last ten minutes” (Palahniuk 13). Two pages later, we are down to three minutes (it is certainly “we” because from page one, the narrator uses the second person “you” while telling his story). There are references to numbers of minutes throughout the novel, a reference to a specific time (Palahniuk 32), mentions of losing time due to lost sleep, and the phrase “for that moment” (Palahniuk 143) or similar words are used often. The concept of a moment becomes very important as time is traced through the pages of the novel.
There are frequent mentions of the past and the future. The men of Fight Club seem to be rebelling against history and attempting to build a better future. “The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history… what Tyler says about being the crap and the slaves of history, that’s how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have” (Palahniuk 123). The last page of the novel focuses on the goal of changing the future when someone whispers, “we’re going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world” (Palahniuk 208). None of this past/future dichotomy matters however, when the reader looks closer and understands that the real message presented is to live in the present.
When the narrator meets Tyler, he says something that is repeated many times throughout the text: “One minute was enough… a person had to work for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection” (Palahniuk 33). This is of focusing on the present moment is repeated during the chemical burn. Tyler constantly tries to bring the narrator back to that moment to focus on the pain – the pain that will change his life “because everything up to now is a story and everything after now is a story” (Palahniuk 75). If the past is a story and the future is a story, then we are best served living in the present moment. Without doing so, we may miss our minute of perfection.
The time theme is hit again when the narrator is put in a near death experience and asked what he will wish he had done before he died. There is another countdown as he moves closer to death, but the last number is never reached. This shows again that the future is not certain, and we must focus on where we are right now. Near the novel’s end, the reader is once again reminded of the moral of the story in case it had been overlooked previously: “everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you’re proud of will end up as trash… a moment is the most you could ever expect from perfection” (Palahniuk 201).
Fight Club also contains numerous religious references, which at first seem to serve multiple purposes, but closely traced, these references to God and religion allow the reader to answer the question of whether it is Tyler or the narrator who is the illusion. When the narrator first meets Tyler Durden, he is naked on a beach pulling pieces of driftwood across the sand and creating something. “What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand, and Tyler was sitting in the palm of a perfection he’d made himself” (Palahniuk 173). This sets Tyler up as something more than human because he has the ability to create perfection. Shortly after, we see Tyler cast in the image of God as the narrator calls him for the first time and offers a prayer to him: “Oh, Tyler, please deliver me… please rescue me… deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete” (Palahniuk 46). Moving forward, the God references continue and are always linked to Tyler.
On page 72, as Tyler is making the narrator promise to never talk about him to Marla, the promise must be made three times. This references the Biblical story of Peter who denied Christ three times and then three times professed his love and loyalty after Jesus’ resurrection. Tyler also makes soap, a symbol or cleanliness and purity, and points out that “soap and human sacrifice go hand in hand” (Palahniuk 75). This relates to the idea of Jesus as a human sacrificed himself so that all other humans could be cleaned and purified. Tyler, like God, wants his followers to follow him with question and even says to the narrator “If I loved him, I’d trust him” (Palahniuk 89).
Pages 140-141 explore what is called “Tyler Durden dogma” and asks the reader to examine the human relationship to God. For the reader who may not have caught on yet, direct evidence is offered in the text to the equation of Tyler with God when the narrator reflects on the fact that everyone believes he is Tyler. We are now directly told, “to everybody there, I am Tyler Durden the Great and Powerful. God and father” (Palahniuk 199).
These references all culminate in the last chapter of the book where laying in a hospital bed is equated with being in heaven. “Everything in heaven is quiet… I can sleep in heaven” (Palahniuk 206) the narrator tells us. And at this point, the careful reader understands that this is, necessarily, the narrator and that Tyler Durden has been the product of his mind. Though the legend of Tyler Durden is so big it has reached “heaven” and people passing by are still referring to him as Mr. Durden, the person in the hospital now refers to the doctor as God and is, thus, still searching for this concept of God and father outside of himself. If this person were the God figure that Tyler Durden was, he would not refer to something outside of himself as God – Tyler is God. This one clue in the text demonstrates that the being in the hospital in the last chapter cannot be Tyler and solves the riddle of which character was the “real” person.
Though examining the novel through different critical lenses can reveal different questions, different evidence, and completely different answers, it is most important to understand that each of these interpretations is valid. The fact that Fight Club is so complex in the amount of analysis that one can do with each of these schools of theory indicates it is a work of literature worth exploring in an academic setting. While some of what the novel offers is obvious, there is more under the surface that can be quite challenging to find without a critical eye. Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club extends far beyond the existentialist, nihilistic fluff that so many dismiss it as and provides a depth that should be fully examined under as many different critical lenses as possible. By doing so with this and other contemporary texts, the concept of literature fit for academic use can expand and grow rather than stagnate with outdated, irrelevant works.
Works Cited:
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1999.
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Carter, David. Literary Theory. Harpenden, Herts: Pocket Essentials, 2006. Kindle edition.
Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Kindle edition.
De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 1973.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology (From Part I). Criticism: The Major Statements. Ed.
Charles Kaplan. New York: St. Martin’s Press Inc, 1986. 590-605. Print.
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Freud: On Psychosexual Development." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 1 Jan 2011. Purdue U. 3 Sep 2011.
Kavadlo, Jesse. “The Fiction of Self-Destruction: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist”. Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 3-24. Web. 2 Sep 2011.
Kennett, Paul. “Fight Club and the Dangers of Oedipal Obsession”. Stirrings Still 2.2 (2005): 3-24. Web. 2 Sep 2011.
Mark Pettus: "Terminal Simulation: 'Revolution' in Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club." HJEAS 4:2 (2000): 111-128.
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1996.
Price, Marc. “The Fight for Self: The Language of the Unconscious in Fight Club”. The Cult: The Official Chuck Palahniuk Site. 31 Aug 2011. A Writer’s Cult, LLC. 3 Sep 2011.
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