Fight Club

A little confession: fighting awakens a beast inside of me.

Sometimes when I’m in a crowded place, I walk by someone, usually a bigger person, and wonder: “Can I take him down?” Other times, especially in situations of conflict and mostly in the business world, I catch myself looking at my opposition and think “I can totally crush you if I want.” 

I’m not sure Palahniuk has ever traded punches with another human being. But one thing he got right: learning to fight, especially at a place that makes you spar at every session, often creates this maddening sense of… show more.

A rare case where the film is as powerful as the book, or even more so.

At first glance Fight Club is about a friendship between two men who are angry with a world that values consumerism over all else. They decide to fight back, inciting an underground cult where the oppressed literally beat the humanity back into each other.

At second glance one of those men seems to exist only in the imagination of the other – so, I’m not sure. It’s deeply twisted, yet deserves its place in infamy. They say the first rule of Fight Club is… show more.

Who doesn’t love a novel where the protagonist discovers he’s not the person he thought he was. There’s one such big reveal in Fight Club, and it throws into question everything that has happened and will happen. Stuck in a dull life without purpose, the novel’s unnamed (and apparently unreliable) narrator meets a strange, destructive soap-seller named Tyler Durden, with whom he establishes a fight club. But when (spoiler) the narrator learns he is Tyler Durden, it becomes clear how far this brilliant, subversive novel is leading the reader down a dark and dangerous road in search of deeper… show more.

Fight club is a chainsaw-dissection of the concept of 90s masculinity, a nihilistic poem of self-destruction set against a violently consumerist backdrop. Crucially for me, it's essentially a story of warring identities. All of the narrator's fiercest, most intense struggles are against himself—or a version of himself he creates as a brutal critique of his own shortcomings and flawed ambitions. The film adaptation is occasionally misused to prop up some very dodgy politics, and I haven't quite forgiven Palahniuk for accidentally putting the term "snowflake" into popular use as an insult, but Fight Club is still a savagely powerful depiction… show more.

“Unless we get God’s attention, we have no hope of damnation or redemption.” This is a stunning book, beautifully written, insightful, and crazy too. Chuck Palahniuk illustrates the suffering of just existing as no one special, working a meaningless job, and finding no value or purpose in day-to-day life. Through insomnia-induced delirium, the narrator finds a sense of freedom in the chaos and meaning in the pain. Perhaps he also sees light shining through the breaks in society where fighting takes place because he says, “only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”

I believe… show more.

If you haven’t read this much-maligned book in the past five years or so, give it another look. It’s often been panned as glorifying violence and toxic masculinity but, with the right set of eyes, it becomes a dire warning about what happens to a society that values nothing and tries to placate the suffering of its people with clothes they don’t need and vacations they will never afford. It is a tale about what happens when a system fails to provide anything but crass consumerism to its people. And it isn’t pretty. 

Let me tell you, this is the mother of all unreliable narrators. We probably all know the moment when it happens, when we realize that Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, errr, Tyler Durden, can no longer be considered reliable in their telling of the tale. But how much better to read the words Palahniuk wrote, find in them the genesis of the movie, than to just get them fed to you while you're tied to an office chair with a gun in your mouth? Read it. You'll feel dirty and smart all at once.

An anonymous narrator working as a reclaim specialist for a car company, battles insomnia and severe boredom with everyday life. His mundanity gives rise to the introduction of the anarchic entity of Tyler Durden, an extremist who is the exact opposite of The Narrator in every way. Tyler coerces The Narrator into creating a club where similar-minded men can slog out their insecurities in bare-knuckle fights. Add a damaged damsel to the mix and Tyler quickly starts turning against The Narrator, who finds himself at odds when Tyler transforms Fight Club into an anti-consumerist movement that wants to bomb buildings.… show more.

Chuck Palahniuk is one of the best writers of satirical dark fiction, and Fight Club is my favorite of his books. It’s most famous for its premise of a secret club of men who willingly engage in organized, bare-knuckle fistfights—but, subversively, Palahniuk’s novel uses razor-sharp wit and humor to examine themes of consumerism, anarchy, and subjugated masculinity through the strange and unlikely friendship of the book’s nameless narrator and his mysterious friend, Tyler Durden. The first rule of Fight Club: no spoilers.