Fight Club

‘A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.’
Tyler Durden

There is a lot I can choose to say about this novel and frame it rather well with research but the simple fact is that I won’t bother because it has all been done before. A review or critical analysis simply won’t cover the whole base of the novel since opinion in itself is an isolating bastard. Loads of critics have hated or loved this Chuck Palahniuk novel but for me the object in this review is not to tell you why you should hate or love it but to simply plead you to read it if you have idle hands waiting to turn the pages of the next book. I leave the judgements to you.

Sure there is the mindless violence, the renewal of a man, the hopelessness of the consumer culture and the slow construction of a destructive cult. All that’s fine and taken care of. What’s important though are not the answers the novel puts ahead (which are as you can gather on anti-social lines) but the questions it asks. It immediately divides the reader and society itself into two groups: the consumer and the consumed. The consumers can go through life manipulating their desires with their wallets but the consumed, who don’t have this option, what are they to do? The ones who have no future and a shaky past and a present that is anything but a gift? They would and after the popularity of the novel and the subsequent book, do, start an anonymous club where the meeting is not for comfort and hugging each other but to knock the living daylights out of each other. This is their ‘moment of perfection’ and it is repeated every week. They see their failed hopes and desires personified in a person before them (and vice-versa) so that they can sleep at night knowing that there is more to life than teeth and sofas.

This surprisingly anarcho-primitivistic piece is only popular because such people not only exist in our modern society but must exist. They are werewolves that show their fangs at Fight Club and hide in the sheep’s skin for the rest of the week. Some may say that such mindless indulgence is no release or solution of anything but that is exactly the point of the nihilistic tone of the work: nothing. When you got nothing, you got nothing to use. Or as Tyler Durden puts it, ‘maybe self-improvement is not the answer, maybe self-destruction is the answer.’

The unnamed narrator of the novel is tired of his job doing auto-recalls. He can’t sleep from the comfort of his condo and accessories sticking to his soul. He seeks an answer and he finds it in Tyler Durden, his recent mentor. He is Calvin while Tyler is Hobbes and together they envisage a society where money, jobs, cars et all do not matter. There idea of utopia is a world that is not hypocritical and selfish but a world where everything could be taken care of by participation alone. If that means beating the daylights out of someone or destroying corporate culture then so be it. Many have frowned about the extra masochistic message of the book but they miss the point of the author.

Maybe you won’t miss it. So go on and read it and once you done, look for your own point of perfection…no matter where it lies.

Watch the Fight Club movie trailer (1999)