Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk
I’m trying to read a novel a week. This is number 1. As usual, I will not be writing reviews of the books I’m reading. I am giving my impressions and applications; things I take away from the book. Here’s ten conveniently starting with the letter ‘s.’
1. Sleep: If you know what it’s like to have insomnia, or even extreme fatigue, you can immediately relate to the nameless narrator. That’s the first thing that sucked me into the story. Feeling like you don’t know if you’re awake or asleep; having days, weeks run together in a sort of blur.
2. Sissies: That’s the next big sticking point. Men culturally neutered. Men shopping for furniture. Men living in highrise apartments. Men stuck sitting at desks. Men needing a good fight. This book is a scathing indictment of a culture that suppresses manhood.
3. Schizophrenia: It’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde without the magic and the medicine. The battle of good versus evil in one person; the tendency of the evil to dominate.
4. Sympathy and Sobs: I haven’t read Palahniuk’s book Choke yet, but I’ve surmised it’s about a man who feigns chocking in order to gain human contact and sympathy, as well as money. The nameless narrator of Fight Club is desperate for human contact. He blubbers like a baby in the arms of a cancer-riddled bodybuilder. Support groups, in which he has no real business, support his sanity. This again is a scathing critique of a culture that knows little about true affirmation and community.
5. Shock: Don’t read Palahniuk if you don’t want to be shocked. And not all the shock is good or even needful in my opinion; but sometimes it’s necessary.
6. Soldiery: Project Mayhem. Men are ready to join a cause; better make sure it’s the right one. Here it’s the cult of personality. And HERE it’s often the cult of personality.
7. Salvation: Or perhaps anti-salvation. Rebirth or anti-rebirth. One of my favorite lines in the book has to do with the narrator constantly traveling by plane for his job. He’s awake, he’s asleep. He wakes up and he’s in a totally different place. He says, “If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person?” It serves as a beautiful foreshadow to the rest of the book. I’ll devote another post to that line of thought.
8. Shrinks: Heaven is a Psych Ward. God is a psychiatrist. At least, that’s what the narrator thinks in the end.
9. Superman: It’s a tale of boredom; of man’s need to rip off his suit and tie like Superman. The only thing is that this ripping off of the suit and tie results in an epic of nihilism that produces exactly the kind of superman Nietzche pointed to – a man wholly of this world. His heaven is a Psych Ward after all.
I would hesitate to recommend this book to someone who isn’t very mature. It’s rough. But it’s also quite disturbingly beautiful. I read it twice. Should I even mention that it’s better than the movie? But the movie is pretty good.
