Introduction
The story told in Fight Club focuses on the creation of intense relationships between people who are desperately searching to find fulfillment in a world that is gone crazy. The story focuses upon an unnamed narrator who struggles to find a sense of fulfillment in a world in which personal fulfillment is supposed to be accomplished through making the right purchases and having access to the right places. This never-ending search for the almighty dollar and the things it can buy leaves little room for a personality or a ‘self’, instead of filling the individual with a never-ending need to drone for corporations that might eventually provide them with the ‘ideal’ criteria of a ‘good life.
Fight Club explores issues of dehumanity and the paths taken by people attempting to discover their human elements after having given them up for the corporate combine. The story capitalizes on the sense of alienation and dissociation caused by an increasingly complex world. The narrator of Fight Club drifts through an emasculating world of capital gains and risks with little or no true reward and no outlet or encouragement for human emotional involvement. The narrator is unable to find satisfaction in pursuing those objects that his society tells him are important and he turns instead to exterior models as a means of attempting to bridge the gap.
Main text
The narrator of Fight Club plods through his empty work cycle, traveling to various accident sites in order to determine whether or not products should be recalled and weighing the risks of recall versus potential lawsuits that might occur. He is tremendously dissatisfied with his life and feels empty and completely without energy, but he also cannot sleep at night.
To try to fill the void of his life, he attempts to get his doctor to prescribe sleeping pills and begins attending meetings for seriously ill people on his doctor’s recommendation, in order to ‘get an idea of what real suffering is’, but he finds instead that he is comforted by his proximity to real emotion. As he becomes more and more in touch with his emotions, he comes face to face with Tyler Durden, who works as a salesman.
Between the two of them, they found a fight club, in which men go to fight with each other simply to have a means of expressing their male physicality, a direct refutation of the emasculating work they perform in their daily routines. As the clubs become more popular, a faction begins to develop called ‘Project Mayhem’ in which individuals fight against capitalism and its deadening effects. As the narrator tries to curb the enthusiasm and violence of this group, he regains contact with Tyler, finally realizing that Tyler is really his alter ego and the two of them share the same body.
There is a female character involved in this entire process as well. Marla Singer is encountered as another pseudo-sickie who attends support meetings as a means of experiencing real emotion in her own falsely defined world.
Demonstrating her own sense of desperation, she overdoses on Xanax at one point in the film and is rescued by Tyler.
As a result of this connection, the two of them begin a sexual relationship that engenders some strange responses from Tyler, such as forbidding the narrator to talk with anyone else about him (Tyler). The reason for this doesn’t become clear until late in the story when it is finally revealed that Tyler is the narrator’s alter ego, emerging when the narrator is asleep and directing all of the activities of ‘Project Mayhem’, including the climactic destruction of several of the country’s major credit card companies in an attempt to bring the system to its knees.
The narrator finally confronts Tyler as himself and manages to assert his own masculine control over his body and being reunited with Marla as a complete individual. While her part in the action is relatively small compared to the part played by Judy, Marla remains important as a representation of a modern woman also suffering the effects of a world taken over by capitalistic concerns.
Conclusion
This sense of disconnection revealed as a manifestation of overt and dominating capitalism is the underlying theme of the story. The narrator is only able to find a sense of himself by comparing himself with others who do not fit into the socially defined norms. He finds it necessary to redefine himself through a dangerous and confusing process of externalization and re-internalization, first discovering his sense of manhood and then accepting it for what it is and finding a way of incorporating it without allowing it to take control of him completely.
As this investigation reveals, the action of Fight Club warns against the negative effects of capitalization upon the basic human-ness of our race. No longer strictly a concern separating generations, the ill-effects of capitalism has grown to encompass all generations, instilling a deadening sense of alienation, dissociation and dehumanization in the face of a dollars and cents world where everything has its price.
The characters of Fight Club struggle to overcome this dehumanizing effect to establish their own sense of self and re-connect to their inner emotions and identities in whatever way they can. The fact that Tyler finds it necessary to split his personality in half in order to retain a sense of humanity, and that he assigns his name to this entity rather than keeping a name for himself, illustrates the depth to which the dehumanizing corporate world has succeeded in creating a world of drone beings and empty shells out of human beings.
Works Cited
Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996.