Fight Club Lesson 11

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Fight Club

Lesson 11

In Class Today

Summary and Analysis chapters 22-25

Essay writing

Chapter 22 - Summary 

The narrator confronts Tyler, finally realizing that they're the same person, "us[ing] the same body, but at different times" (164).

He realizes that he's been a part of everything Project Mayhem has done, including almost castrating the Seattle Police Commissioner who almost shut down Seattle's Fight Club.

Chapter 22 - Analysis

The narrator is recovering some of his memory of Tyler's actions, as if he can perceive what Tyler does while the narrator sleeps. But there is a struggle over who has ultimate control; who is the real person and who is the hallucination? The stakes are set for the final showdown, a showdown that already began in the first chapter. The tension in the plot is increased by Tyler's aggression, but it's also increased by this puzzle: it's hard to understand how Tyler could possibly carry out his threat. How could Tyler be "here last" (168)? 

Chapter 23 - Summary 

Back home, our narrator (we still don't feel comfortable calling him Tyler), takes Marla out to eat, making sure the waiter doesn't give her any contaminated food, of course. He fears the space monkeys. Other girls might be freaked out, but Marla thinks our narrator's schizophrenic wackiness is exciting.

Our narrator hopes that, with Marla's help, he can undo all the damage Tyler's caused while he's been sleeping.

Chapter 23 - Analysis

Earlier Tyler and the narrator both used their own inferior status to punish their bosses. Now Tyler turns it around; this time he is the boss. He teaches his space monkeys they are "crap" and "waste" as a way to increase their devotion to him.

Along with the narrator's new realization Tyler is his enemy, the narrator feels increasingly threatened by Tyler's loyal space monkeys. Even leaving the Paper Street house is no guarantee of safety; space monkeys lurk everywhere.

Chapter 24 - Summary 

This chapter begins with a chant. "His name is Robert Paulson and he is forty-eight years old" (24.1). Poor big-busted Bob is dead. Shot by the police, who thought his drill was a handgun.

Everyone in every Fight Club across the country is performing this chant. Our narrator tries to tell them to go home, but they just won't listen. 

And get this: they actually kick him out of fight club. "In a hundred cities, fight club goes on without me" (180).

Chapter 24 - Analysis

Anyone who gets arrested while on a Project Mayhem assignment is dropped from the group forever—a shameful exit. But dying in the group's service grants the space monkey a hero's status. Death is the only way to leave Project Mayhem honorably. Tyler has turned Project Mayhem's biggest flaw—it could kill you—into an attraction.

Chapter 25 - Summary 

This chapter, barely two pages, is a conversation between our narrator and Marla about how to stay awake.

Options: (1) Sleeping pills up the butt. (2) Bowling.

He chooses the latter. What about you?

Chapter 25 - Analysis

Now that Marla and the narrator have joined forces against Tyler, Marla seems to want to feminize the narrator by putting him in a dress. The narrator won't go against his personal ideals of masculine behavior just because he's fighting Tyler. He repeats, for emphasis: "I'm not cross-dressing, and I'm not going to put pills up my ass" (182). 

Chapter 25 - Analysis

Now the size of Project Mayhem's membership works against the narrator's plans to resist Tyler. The Project has spread across the country. The narrator says, of the hotel desk clerk, "I can imagine him calling some Project Mayhem headquarters"—not the headquarters, but one headquarters among many.

Essay writing

Some of you are still looking for a goos thesis statement.

Take a good look at the 5 themes again:

1.  Consumerism, Perfection and Modernity
   
2.  Masculinity in Modern Society
3.  Death, Pain and the " Real" 
4.  Rebellion and Sacrifice
5.  Repression and the Unconscious Mind

Consumerism, Perfection and Modernity

In order to understand what motivates the characters of Fight Club, we have to understand what they’re fighting against. Overall, much of the novel’s project involves satirizing modern American life, particularly what the novel sees as the American obsession with consumerism and the mindless purchasing of products.

Another important aspect of modern American life, as the novel portrays it, is the emphasis on beauty and perfection, whether in a human body or in something like an apartment.

Consumerism, Perfection and Modernity

In contrast to consumerism, the novel depicts traditional sources of fulfillment and pleasure, such as family and religion, as either nonexistent or fragmented. The Narrator barely knows or speaks to his father, and none of the characters in the novel are presented as believing in God—the implication being that consumerism has become America’s new “religion”. In structuring their lives around transient, superficial pleasures like the purchasing of products, consumers deny themselves any deeper emotional or spiritual satisfaction—a vacuum that Tyler’s fight club (and then Project Mayhem) attempts to fill.

Masculinity in Modern Society

Nearly all the characters in Fight Club are men (the one notable exception is Marla Singer), and the novel examines the state of masculinity in modern times.

Masculinity in Modern Society

The novel suggests that modern society emasculates men by forcing them to live consumerist lives centered around shopping, clothing, and physical beauty. The novel further suggests that such traits are necessarily effeminate, and therefore that because American society prizes these things it represses the aspects of men that make men, men. In short, the novel depicts the men it portrays as being so emasculated they’ve forgotten what being a “real man” means.

Masculinity in Modern Society

Fight club emerges as a reaction to this state of affairs, with the purpose of allowing men to rediscover their raw masculinity. But what, according to Fight Club, is masculinity? Based on the philosophy of the fight clubs themselves, being a masculine, “real” man means being willing to feel pain, and dole pain out to other people. For Tyler Durden (and perhaps Palahniuk as well) masculinity is, above all, a physical state: an awareness of one’s body, and a willingness to use one’s body to satisfy deep, aggressive needs. As such, the fight clubs offer the men a thrilling sense of life that the rest of their existence sorely lacks.

Masculinity in Modern Society

While the members of fight club and Project Mayhem dismiss women and femininity altogether, toward the end of the book the Narrator goes to Marla for help while fighting Tyler and Project Mayhem. Perhaps, through the Narrator’s alliance with Marla, Palahniuk is trying to suggest that the answer to society’s problems (perceived effeminateness) isn’t to “swing back” in the opposite direction and be hyper-masculine, but to embrace some values that are stereotypically masculine (such as strength) and some that are more stereotypically feminine (such as compassion)—values that in fact aren’t masculine or feminine, but simply human.

Death, Pain and the "Real"

Most of the characters in Fight Club, including the Narrator and Tyler, are attracted to pain and fighting—on the most immediate level, they go to fight club in order to hurt themselves, as well as each other, and most of the characters are obsessed with death. In large part, the novel’s characters behave masochistically because they consider death and pain to be more “real” than the lives they lead outside the fight club. But how does the novel define the “real?”

Death, Pain and the "Real"

As the novel portrays it, the Narrator and millions of other people like him live meaningless, superficial lives, dominated by purchasing goods. By starting the fight club (and visiting cancer support groups before that), the Narrator and Tyler are trying to exist “in the moment”—they want to feel pain in order to move closer to a visceral, physical world that they cannot access in the course of their ordinary lives. 

Death, Pain and the "Real"

The relationship between death, pain, and reality is summed up by Marla Singer, who tells the Narrator that she wants to get as close as possible to death without actually dying. The goal of the fight club, then, is to bring its members closer and closer to death in order to get them to truly embrace life—that’s why Tyler pours lye on his recruits’ hands, urges his recruits to get in fights and lose, and sends them on dangerous missions—to feel pain, to experience fear and danger, and in so doing to feel the thrill of life.

Rebellion and Sacrifice

Fight Club is a story of rebellion: frustrated, emasculated men rebelling against what they perceive as an unjust, effeminized society that forces them to live dull and meaningless lives.

Rebellion and Sacrifice

At first, Tyler, the Narrator, and their followers at fight club “rebel” in an individual, relatively self-contained way: they fight with each other in order to inject masculinity into own lives. By beating each other up, the members of fight club give up their own complacency and safety for the sake of pain and “realness,” proving to themselves that they’re not slaves to consumerist society and a culture of shallow comfort. In this case, the members of fight club are “rebelling” against their society by escaping from it. They’re not trying to fight that society directly.

Repression and the Unconscious Mind

One of the most famous elements of Fight Club is the “twist” ending: the Narrator and Tyler Durden, seemingly two different characters, are actually just two sides of the same person. The narrator, dissatisfied with his dull, consumerist life, gradually and unknowingly imagines Tyler, his alter ego, in order to escape reality: Tyler is the person the Narrator would be if he could get over his own inhibitions (Tyler is confident, daring, aggressive, charming, etc.).

Repression and the Unconscious Mind

While Tyler is the projection of the Narrator’s unconscious mind, his creation is also a result of the surrounding culture of consumerism and materialism that forces the Narrator to live a sheltered, repressed existence. His unconscious “masculine” thoughts therefore have no outlet - they build up, develop a personality of their own, and eventually come “alive.” In a way, the repression implicit in modern society creates Tyler. In this way, Palahniuk suggests that the Narrator’s desire for escape, and therefore the creation of his alter ego, are necessary reactions to the conditions of contemporary American life.