...Alan Badel English 100/Major Essay #2 Professor Raymond Morris 23 October 2015 The Fight Club Aims to Free Individuals from Society’s Emasculating Shackles Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is an exciting fictional novel that will hold the audience captive following three revolving main characters in Marla Singer, Tyler Durden, and the narrator himself as they take the reader through confusing twists and perspectives, while providing a most revealing closure. Although the title suggests an exclusive organization focused on violence, the novel describes the emasculation of man in today’s modern age of consumerism, societal associations and family structure along with the main and sub-characters’ exercising of power and submission to power as evident throughout the novel. Chuck Palahniuk’s values illustrate in the novel how humanity is being enslaved by the power of consumerism, brought to general awareness a new mental disorder, and how he portrayed the narrator having experienced or enacted numerous anarchistic efforts in the hopes of being freed from the confines of an industrialized and necessity-driven society. It should also be noted that several rebellious acts were performed by the fight club members and subsequently members of Project Mayhem in order to gain notoriety and power in response to being economically and socially subdued. To understand the novel’s numerous projection of emasculation, masculinity will need to be established. Man’s foundation of masculinity...
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...Greek god, who went back to the city of Cadmus in Thebes to seek vengeance for his mother Semele, whom had a child with Zeus, but was denied this birth right by the plotting of his grandfather Cadmus and his aunts, one of them being Agava, the mother of the reigning king; Pentheus, in the land of Thebes. (Euripides, 410BC) Ed Norton (narrator) is working in an insurance firm and feels that his life has become too monotonous and he does not feel alive to it. This starts manifesting in his lack of sleep and a suggestion to visit a testicular cancer meet by his doctor sets him off on his self-discovery. Tyler who is one and the same (a projection) of the two main characters of the plot in Fight club is a soap sales man. The narrator of the movie (who remains unnamed) sets out to start a fight club with this soap sales man he met on the plane. The concept is triggered by a mutually agreed scuffle they have while leaving a pub to go home. The patterns of behavior of Dionysus and Tyler via Ed Norton are uncanny. First of all the audience in the movie only learn that Tyler Durden is a projection of Ed Norton at the tail end of the movie, Dionysus on his part also sets out to hide his true identity from the people of Thebes when he sets out on his journey to redeem his mother’s honor, this we are told in the first stanza in the excerpt he says: “I have put off the god and taken human shape”(Euripides, 410BC) Dionysus, Tyler/Norton have one triggering course that sets off the plots...
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...Don DeLillo’s book, White Noise, tells the story of Jack Gladney and his family. Throughout the book, Jack takes on a professional, fictional persona resembling that of Hitler, being the Chairman of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill (DeLillo 4). Jack turns his professional persona into this fictional character, something he could transform himself into, as if he was filling a Hitler mold. Jack relies on this Hitler-esque persona to sustain his own personal identity and self-worth, although in his mind, this fake persona is only subsidiary to his own personality. Jack struggles with ascertaining the importance of himself as compared to the importance of his own made-up persona and this notion of fabricated reality becoming more important that actual reality is offered throughout White Noise. While in his role of Chairman of Hitler Studies, he refers to himself as J.A.K. Gladney and dresses in sweeping, dramatic robes while teaching. Jack also takes into consideration the advice of the chancellor, “He wanted me to “grow out” into Hitler. He himself was tall, paunchy, ruddy, jowly, big-footed and dull. A formidable combination. I had the advantages of substantial height, big hands, big feet, but badly needed bulk” (DeLillo 16). This impression of J.A.K. Gladney differed greatly from Jack’s own character, and the fact that he does not know German only adds to the plasticity of his fabricated self. The idea of false reality overtaking actual reality is shown by Jack and...
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...Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a narration on the separation and attempt to find oneself. The men in Fight Club battle each other and every time they hit their opponent, this helps the fighters find a sense of masculinity that has not been corrupted by the consumerism society they live in. The novel takes place in the nineties in a society that gets overpowered by large corporations. The narrator is not playing with a full deck, so to speak. He is only a depiction of one's ego and sometimes he lets Tyler(id) take over for him. Throughout the novel Tyler takes the narrator and himself on a quest to make the narrator's dreams come true. The twist comes in when the narrator becomes stronger from the help of Tyler(id) and he takes control again....
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...Introduction Mass culture would have most readers and viewers believing that the Post-modern American male is a simple creature. Common stereotypes margin male satisfaction in a minimal setting – a Lazyboy armchair in a lounge with a flat screen TV playing ‘the game’ along with primal banter regarding women. More often than not, this is washed down with a beer. With this array of comfort and leisure we are inclined to believe that male lifestyle has reached its peak on the timeline of satisfaction. This was until David Fincher took Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club and made it into a big budget Hollywood blockbuster. With the male demographic being the hardest to pinpoint in the literature sense, David Fincher’s adaptation helpfully put Palahniuk’s thoughts into the cinematic forefront. This increased the popularity of Palahniuk’s other works and placed him in the cannon of Post-modern American fiction. It is the issues of modern masculinity that grasps critics’ attention more so than any other Palahniuk themes. It is very apparent that masculinity has changed as a natural progression of modernisation. This dissertation will analyse masculinity as it is depicted in Palahniuk’s writings and explore Palahniuk’s intentions and beliefs. I will interpret the responses of select critics in order to gain some understanding of what Palahniuk deems to be the ideal model of masculinity in the modern world, beneath his post-modern twists, transgressive characterization and...
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...Emasculated Reality The novel Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk is filled with a large number of motifs from downward movement and destruction to overall decay. The unnamed narrator uses motifs to show images and pictures of greater themes throughout the novel. The narrator and other main character Tyler Durden share the feeling that civilization has emasculated men and, “What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women” (Palahniuk 50). The author shows the reader many themes by describing overly vivid motifs that represent them. Motifs are images that show up throughout a work. Fight Club uses motifs of downward movement and disintegration to point to the larger themes of emasculation, self-destruction and rejection of civilization. Motifs of downward movement in the novel make visible many of the cultural norms, by which the narrator feels extremely emasculated. Not only do cultural norms make him feel emasculated, but also being surrounded by men who don't typically fit the definition of a man. The narrator himself doesn’t fit the definition of a typical man. He works a cubicle 9 to 5 job that is split with being sent all across the country like a carrier pigeon, evaluating insurance claims on failed safety equipment in cars that have already been subject to horrible life threatening accidents. Emasculation hits the narrator when he feels like it pointless to die in a body without few scars. The narrator says, “It’s nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock...
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...Fight Club "There is enough on earth for everybody's need, but not for everyone's greed.” Mahatma Gandhi This quote fits perfectly on me. Even though I have enough clothes to last an entire lifetime, yet I keep finding myself at the mall, buying things I simple do not need at all. And I am not the only one, millions of people is doing the same thing. It is because we need certain things: we desire different certain things. Now what is that problem called? Consumerism. Modern society is based on different things. But one of those things, consumerism, has been growing majorly over the past couple of decades, mainly in America. Americans consume exponentially more than any other country in the world and are the leaders in waste production and It’s not only depression - that is harming the over consumers, it’s also creates lifestyles disease. In many people lives it’s controlling their lives. For a lot of people their main concern is how other people seen. “The things you, end up owning you” – that is a quote from fight club. Fight club is a book/film who shows consumerism at its worst form. The main character is first in the film, completely controlled of consumerism, which is described later in the essay. The book Fight Club is written by Chuck Palahniuk, it was later turned into a film. The Film/book is about a nameless narrator who works for a major car manufacture how can’t sleep. He has insomnia. He stumbles across different types of support groups. They make the...
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...Minimalist contentions: Fight Club Introduction Chuck Palahniuk is one of the most influential American fiction writers who emerged in the 1990s. His debut novel, Fight Club (hereafter: FC) reached cult status after the film adaptation by David Fincher was released in 1999, and widespread and divided critical reception was soon to follow. Much of the current debate about Fight Club focuses on the political implications of the text, but most often recourse to it by way of referencing the film. These arguments usually question or celebrate the transgressive potentials of the book (Giroux; Mendieta), or address issues of masculinity brought into the fore by their literary and cinematic representations emergent in the same decade (Tuss; Friday). However, few, if any, have addressed the literary aspirations of the text and its author. Although none of the approaches to the thematic concerns of Fight Club are unjustified, in the argument that follows I will suggest that conclusions drawn and critical judgments passed have been hasty, and not only failed to take into account the formal aspects of story-telling, but that the narrative features of Palahniuk’s text have largely went unexplored, and constitute a blind spot of the reception. Critics condemning or acclaiming the novel, and, indeed, many a cultic reader of Palahniuk ignored Fight Club as a literary narrative, and have inadvertently been repeating the catchphrases of the text, either reinforcing or trying to undermine what...
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...Fight Club is a story of the narrator’s struggle to gain control over his life. He is in search for an identity in the form of manhood. His masculinity is so repressed because of the absence of a father figure in his life. Because of this he creates Tyler, his alternate personality. Tyler is nothing like anyone the narrator has met, he is self assured and completely free. The narrators alternate personality Tyler Durden is the ultimate alpha-male. Tyler becomes the narrator’s hero and he envied him. After creating Tyler the narrator’s view on the world is adjusted. Tyler ends up changing the narrators life and has him doing things he never thought he would do. Both the narrator and Tyler bond over the fact that both their fathers were not major factors in their lives. The narrator says “ Me, I knew my dad for about six years, but I don’t remember anything”(50). Tyler goes to say that his father was distant and he would only speak to him once a year. Being raised mainly by woman, they both feel they never had a man around to teach them what being a man is. Tyler and the narrator and the generation of men they represent have been trying for years to regain their masculinity and at the same time find a sense of direction. At the support group for men with testicular cancer the narrator meets Bob. Bob later enters fight club and shows he is one of the better fighters that is there. He is seen as a “true man” for his physical abilities. Later on in the book Bob also joins Tyler’s...
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...his boss who’ll do the presentation. While he does that, the narrator tells us about fight club and its eight rules. The first and second rule is that you don’t talk about fight club. The following rules are that when someone says stop, or goes limp, the fight is over, two men per fight, one fight at a time and no shoes or shirts are allowed during fights. The fights go on as long as they have to, and if it’s your first night at fight club, you have to fight. Fight club used to be just Tyler and himself, pounding each other, but it grows and is now held every Saturday. The story takes place at an office at the narrator’s work. It’s not directly written that it takes place there, but the reader can assume so by the fact that the narrator and his boss are doing a presentation for their client Microsoft. The narrator describes the location of fight club as well, which is set in the basement of a bar, after the bar closes on Saturday night. The basement is portrayed as dark with a single lamp. The lamp is placed in the middle of the room where the fights take place. That contributes towards creating an atmosphere where it’s the fight that’s in focus. The narrator of the story is also the protagonist. He lives two lives, “Who I am in fight club is not someone my boss knows” ; one as a recall campaign coordinator and one as a member of fight club. Before starting fight club, he was bored with his life and he felt that his “life just seemed too complete” . He...
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...“It takes a little bit of crazy to make a difference in the world,” said Steven Tallarico, or more commonly known as Steven Tyler. Born on March 26, 1948 in Yonkers, New York, Steven grew up in a musical family with a father who was a Juilliard trained pianist. With this musical influence, he started his first band at 16 called the Strangeurs. As he started to get older, as teenager, he was very rebellious. He was in gangs, got into fights, did drugs, etc. Even though he may have had a rough start as a child and through his teenage years, Steven Tyler, the lead singer of Aerosmith, is a significant person because he is an influential musician since has won many awards, supports charities and owns his own charity, and has overcome a horrible alcohol and drug addiction. First off, Steven Tyler is a significant person because he is an influential musician since has won...
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...Firstly, Tyler faces social discrimination through various types of conflict that affect Tyler negatively. One type of conflict that Tyler confronts in the novel is external conflict. This kind of conflict is when one character and another character are having conflict. This is represented in the following quotation, “Chip reached out and patted me on the back like his father did. But instead of a friendly pat, he smacked me as hard as he could.” and “It started. Not the beating of a lifetime, not bad enough to put me in the hospital, but painful. A fist to my head kicks to my legs.” It is vividly apparent that Tyler is being bullied physically by Chip Milbury. Ever since middle school Chip has been making life worse for Tyler. This predicament has especially fired up since Tyler was accused of posting an inappropriate picture of Bethany Milbury who is twin Chip’s sister. The form of external conflict is extremely prominent in our society; it is distinguished as bullying. Bullying is the most common form of social discrimination in our society and this novel. Tyler also faces internal conflict due to social discrimination, especially since in the school he attends he is considered socially inferior. This quote that is one of the many examples of internal conflict, “I will pull this trigger and a bullet will rip through my skull at eight hundred miles and hour. I will pull this trigger and my brains will detonate. I will pull this trigger and fall.... I stuck the gun...
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...Hunter Davis-Interpersonal Communication Fight Club Fight Club, a 1999 American film, is a brilliantly constructed film of escaping reality and dealing with pain in the famous art form of fighting. Director David Flincher adapted the film from the 1996 novel. Main actors, Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden and Edward Norton as the narrator, act excellently as they deal with their reality by celebrating violence in underground fight clubs. The narrator becomes involved in a relationship triangle between Durden and a self-indulgent woman, Helena Bonham-Carter as Marla Singer. This Rated R action/drama film takes you on a psychological twist as you learn about how a soap maker and a white collar employee seek out freedom and restoration of masculinity. I would rate this movie 4 out of 5 brains because although it gets confusing, it makes you think and as long as you pay attention you will be able to grasp the concept. On top of making you think, I believe it has educational value, such as for a psychology or English class, it is great to pick apart and analyze many of its aspects. This is a film you’ll be talking and thinking about for days. Edward Norton plays an unnamed narrator who is an everyman and a chronic insomniac. With an unfulfilling white collar job, his only dream is to own all of the contents in an IKEA catalogue. To deal with his pain, he seeks 12-step meetings where he can find comfort in people less fortunate than him and find relief in their distress. These meetings...
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...Jason Caprioni Professor O’Hara Sociology 12/10/15 Fight Club: Sociological Analysis Fight Club is one of the most bizarre but fantastic movies I have ever seen. The story starts about showing us the life of Jack (the mostly nameless narrator played by Edward Norton), attending a support group to help subdue his insomnia which emerges from his tasteless life and boring career as an office worker. He begins to attend many support groups, even though he is not diagnosed with any of those illnesses since it helps him feel better. Eventually, he meets Tyler Durden. The "two of them" create a men-only underground fight club which later evolves into Project Mayhem, while also creating soap from human fat stolen from liposuction clinics. While the...
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...The first lens I would like to cover is the marxist lens. The narrators loneliness, hated job and depression lead to him having insomnia and saying “When you have insomnia you're never asleep and never really awake” as he’s watching an infomercial suggesting that he’s not only half conscious because of insomnia but also consumerism. However “Fight Club” shows a world where efficiency is favoured over the necessaries of desires and traditions. So for example instead of getting gourmet cookies from a bakery you would get them from a company who makes these cookies in a cold factory. This is called rationalization which means to ascribe (one's acts, opinions, etc.) to causes that superficially seem reasonable and valid but that actually are unrelated...
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