Fight Club- Chuck Palahniuk by Emily Heard

“We need to be more comfortable and more accepting of chaos, and things that we see as disastrous. Because it is only through those things we can be redeemed and change. We should welcome disaster, we should welcome things that we generally run away from. There is a redemption available in those things that is available nowhere else.”

 

-Chuck Palahniuk’s reason for writing Fight Club

 

 

 

      Fight Club is one of those rare novels that once you finish and set it down you just don’t know what to do next. Your mind feels sharp but your hands feel useless.

 

      You feel this way because after you start this novel you are thrown into a mindset that revolves around raw truth, chaos, mental illness, and much of thebizarre. Through out the book you’re mind is in a never-ending race to keep up with this fascinating world. Later you will realize with awe, and slight horror, that this terrifying world is your own. It is just viewed from a different perspective.

 

Fight Club, the novel, has a vastly different end than to the movie. The narrator goes unknown but the next two main characters are named Tyler Durden and Marla Singer. If you looked up “the Average Joe” a picture of the narrator’s face would pop up. He finds his life vague and unsatisfying. He tries numerous things to get him out of the rut he calls his life. His search leads him to a series of support groups for diseases where he cries and cries even though he doesn’t have any of these illnesses. There he meets a series of different characters but the most significant is Marla Singer.

 

      Later the narrator meets another interesting character named Tyler Durden who shows him how to make home-made bombs with soap, tells him interesting facts about the movie industry, and the fact that before a plane crashes they release laughing gas to make you as calm as a Hindu Cow. Through as series of bizarre events the narrator ends up living with Tyler. They establish an underground fight club for men only. These fight clubs spread all over America until there is one in every major city. Fight Club turns into something bigger: Project Mayhem.

 

    Project Mayhem is an organization of men who create chaos for the world and near the end of the novel the narrator realizes the insanity that’s behind Tyler Durdan’s plans. In an attempt to thwart Tyler’s schemes the narrator realizes something disturbing and shocking: he is Tyler Durdan. The narrator has a split personality that threatens his life. At the end he attempts to kill himself when he finds out about the many buildings he had Project Mayhem members blow up. He is put in an insane asylum where occasionally volunteers will enter and tell him that it’s ok; that all his plans are going into action and they all look forward to his release.

 

 

This book is so empowering it makes you want to go out and do something; you’re just not sure what. You want to do something spectacular and memorable but not as intense as blowing up buildings. Some men have even started their own Fight Clubs.

 

    I think this novel is deeply influential and will bring you out of the realm that taught you to believe in everything you were told. For this reason, yes, I believe this book is defiantly worth anyone’s precious time. After all, “ this is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time.”- Tyler Durden