Fight Club: Reclaiming the Self

Paper Summary:

This paper focuses on the novel "Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk. The paper explains that it is the story of a lonely man who has no friends and is stuck working at a job he does not like. The paper concentrates on the narrator-character and how his life changes drastically when he meets with Tyler Durden with whom he opens the Fight Club. The paper discusses physical violence in the Fight Club, which is used as a means of liberating the individual from a value system. with which he does not identify. The paper looks at how nihilism and existentialism are used throughout the novel as tools of defining the characters.

From the Paper:

"There is a strong existentialist influence in Fight Club, expressed mainly through a recurrent exploration of suffering, death, nothingness and absurdity. According to Bennett, there has not been a sufficient amount of discussion regarding the complexity of the Fight Club text in the sense that critics and supporters alike have limited a full exploration of such a profound text. Although he does not reject the idea - expressed by many critics, that Fight Club tackles issues as gender and class identity, Bennett argues that existentialism, understood both as a philosophical and as an aesthetic practice, provides a superior critical framework for interpreting Fight Club (Bennett: 67). His stance is that Palahniuk's Fight Club is a brilliant sample of the "existential literary tradition with certain postmodern differences" (Bennett: 68) in the sense that the existentialism of the book is very much adapted to its historical context, i.e. the age of "postmodern capitalism" (Ibid: 68). In fact, his argument goes a bit further; he draws a parallel between Fight Club and Dostoyevsky's novella, Notes from the Underground in the sense that they both center on the "alienated individual going underground to rage against a dehumanizing society" (Ibid: 69). Palahniuk's unnamed narrator, who is conventionally referred to as Jack suffers from a wide but vaguely defined range of psychological disorders, including insomnia and narcolepsy - the so-called disorders of the modern man, and has the need to confront himself with the most acute human suffering in order to regain his humanity: "Every evening, I died, and every evening, I was born. Resurrected."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bennett, Robert. "The Death of Sisyphus: Existentialist Literature and the Cultural Logic of Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club." Stirrings Still - The International Journal of Existential Literature 2.2 (2005): 65-80.
• Kavadlo, Jesse. "The Fiction of Self-destruction: Chuck Palahniuk, Closet Moralist."
• Stirrings Still - The International Journal of Existential Literature 2.2 (2005): 3-24.
• Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Owl Books, 1997.

More papers on Fight Club: Reclaiming the Self:

• Analytical Essay # 130987 : "Sound Application in 'Fight Club'"
• Book Review # 94821 : "Fight Club"--A Review"
• Film Review # 133117 : "The Elements of "Fight Club"

APA Citation:

MLA Citation: