Fight Club Research Paper

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
Just like when the narrator blows up his apartment to separate himself from the Ikea lifestyle that he loathes, Tthe narrator rejects his boss as a father figure when he starts to continually find the copies of the Fight Club documents in the copier. The reason the narrator might have kept leaving the papers in the copying machine was that Tyler was in control of the narrator and purposely left them there, hoping that his boss would find them. and thatThis would was intended to anger the narrator to the point where he would reject his boss as a father figure and embrace Tyler as his new role model, and .j ust like when the Tyler side of the narrator blows up the narrator’s apartment to separate him from the Ikea lifestyle that he loathes, Tyler acting through the narrator blows up his boss, destroying his latest father figure, and causing him to turn to Tyler for fatherly
“Burn the Louvre and wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa. This way at least, God would know our names” (141). Project Mayhem’s goal was to create chaos and the Tyler side of the narrator felt that since he was the one who had caused this chaos that maybe God/his father would finally acknowledge him. The side of the narrator that is Tyler felt that the more chaos he caused the more God would want to save him, “The lower you fall, the higher you fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back” (141). The Tyler side of the narrator clearly felt that by doing what he did that he would at least get God to know who he was and to possibly care about what he did, which was something that he never got from his father. Project Mayhem and the chaos it caused was clearly just a way for Tyler/the narrator to get the kind of attention from God that he never got while he was growing up from his