Fight Club

The theme of rebellion is ever present in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, and the novel centers around the rebellious cause of the Narrator and Tyler Durden. The duo form form a fight club as a way to reclaim their masculinity and separate themselves from their bourgeoisie existences, while simultaneously aiming to break the capitalistic society they inhabit. Their efforts eventually expand into what is known as “Project Mayhem”, a terrorist group that aims to annihilate the capitalist culture and eliminate the history of America and start anew. The grandiose schemes eventually transcend out of the Narrator’s reach, attune with Tyler’s anti-individualist creed, but fall in line with the center point of the novel: the Narrator’s desire to remove
Tyler Durden is adamantly against the drive towards self improvement, claims that it strays away from manhood and made them mindless drones of the capitalist society, “working at jobs they hate, just so they can buy shit they don’t need” (Palahniuk, 1996). Fight club allows for liberation from the capitalist mindset, allowing them to become their true selves and split from the bourgeois “Who guys are in fight club is not who they are in the real world. Who I am in fight club is not who I am in the real world” (Palahniuk, 1996). Much like fight club is a vessel for the anti capitalist creed, allowing separation from the bourgeois and allow for them to realize their “true selves”, Tyler Durden acts as the same vessel for the Narrator. Tyler represents the Narrator’s desire to break away from the consumerist, mundane existence, his desire to take back his masculinity and vitality. Fight club takes place “when fight club begins and when fight club ends” (Palahniuk, 1996), and whenever the capitalist serving narrator falls asleep, his true self, Tyler takes over to fortify his goals (Suglia,