FIGHT CLUB

Fight Club - Portrayal of Consumerism in the Novel



Fight Club - Portrayal of Consumerism in the Novel

Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club is a dark novel about an unnamed insomniac who tries to free himself from both his sleeplessness and his attachments to a repetitive job as a recall campaign coordinator. In a desperate search to cure his insomnia, he stumbles upon a network of support groups at his local church. Despite faking the requisite illness, he is still able to release his anxiety and sob uncontrollably on the chest of his nearest neighbor.

His job consists of flying around the country calculating the costs of recalling a vehicle versus the cost of settling claims for fatal accidents, and he often daydreams about the endless ways his plane could crash so he could experience the "amazing miracle of death" (35). Into this life of repetition and isolation, where everything is "a copy of a copy of a copy" (21), enter Marla Singer and Tyler Burden (Lauren 2007). The three characters quickly form a complicated love triangle—"I want Tyler. Tyler wants Marla. Marla wants me" (14)—based more on desperation and animal need than any sort of conventional affection. The narrator's fragile stability is destroyed when his material possessions are lost in an explosion, and turning to Tyler Burden for help, he soon becomes enmeshed in a life.

The novel centers on issues of masculinity, violence, and the American myth, deconstructing popular conceptions of "the American way of life" with its ruthless anatomization of working-class "space monkeys. The narrator initially finds solace in the obsessive collection of material things, the commodity-driven culture manifested in the importance of the IKEA catalogue. However, when his apartment is destroyed, Burden helps him realize that commodities can be a type of confinement.

The novel finally suggests that it is only through a stripping down to bare essentials that one can really learn to live. The removal of artificiality results in an instinctive approach to survival, synthesized through the violence of fighting.

One of the underlying goals of Project Mayhem is to draw attention to the working class, to make the invisible visible. But its members also wage a broader fight, against the metaphorical nation-as-father in the form of social law and order, radically reinventing a connection to God by perverting the classic father-son paradigm.

Tyler believes that, through the regenerative effects of violence, civilization can regain its strength. Project Mayhem is envisioned as a path to this regeneration through the destruction of history, through wiping the slate clean and beginning again. Everything that civilization sees as beautiful must be destroyed, symbolized by numerous references to museums and classical art.

This almost messianic compulsion to rewrite history is reinforced by the structure of the novel itself. Most chapters start in medias res, and Palahniuk spends the next pages filling in the details that led to a particular crisis point. In this way every important scene begins without historical context (Lauren 2007).

In particular, Project Mayhem seeks to rewrite American history from the beginning of ...