Fight Club Analysis

McNally 1
Bryan McNally
Professor Dadras
English 367.02
917 NovemberOctober 2006
The role of fathers and God in Fight Club
The novel Fight Club deals with manyseveral issues that many people feel are particularly relevant in today’s society. These include, consumerism, dissatisfaction with the way masculinity is portrayed, and the role of God and the father in our culture. The novel seems to focuses in on one particular theme that seems to be the driving force behind Tyler/the narrator’s desire to create chaos, and that is the absence of a father which eventually leads to an absence of God in their lives. The novel   focuses in on the fact that both the narrator and Tyler either grew up without or were abandoned by their fathers. As the narrator says, “What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women” (Palahniuk, 50). Tyler/the narrator hasve an opinion that the father should be the model for God, and since they grew up without fathers, they search their entire lives for a father or God. As their search goes on and on they begin to feel as if the reason they do not find them is that their God, like their fathers, has abandoned them and does not care for them. In order to get God/their fathers to care about them, the narrator/Tyler seeks to bring chaos into the world in an attempt to at least be recognized by God.
Tyler and the narrator coincidently share many things in common with the way they grew up,, and oone of theose things is the fact that they both grew up with fathers who were absent during most of their childhoods, and their absences may help to explain how their sons became who they are. Although the narrator does not have any idea that Tyler is actually a part of himself, he feels they share a bond between them because they both
McNally 2
have supposedly grown up with out fathers and it seems they are both resentful of that fact. In the narrator’s case, his father left his mother after 6 years to move on to a new family: "I... [continues]

Read full essay