The First Rule: A Fight Club Playlist. i. Smells Like Teen Spirit/Nirvana ii. Flourescent Adolescent/Arctic Monkeys iii. Arsonist's Lullaby/Hozier iv. Little Faith/The National v. The Kids Are Ready to Die/The Airborne Toxic Event vi. Welcome To Your Wedding Day/The Airborne Toxic Event vii. Cherry Bomb/The Runaways viii. The Feast and the Famine/Foo Fighters ix. Rag & Bone/The White Stripes x. Take Me to Church/Hozier xi. Do Me a Favour/Arctic Monkeys xii. Where Is My Mind?/The Pixies xiii. Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy/Jack White xiv. Riot Van/Arctic Monkeys xv. Sprawl I (Flatland)/Arcade Fire
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“I can remember that in my ardent youth I carried about in my pocket a large but harmless revolver, and whenever anyone said, ‘Life is not worth living,’ I produced it, and always with the most satisfying results.” G.K. Chesterton said this in the Illustrated London News, circa 1906. This quote is significant because six years later Innocent Smith would use the same tactic famously in GKC’s Manalive in 1912- and again the tactic was used in the book Fight Club in 1996. While those later cases are fiction, Chesterton claims he actually did it.
Think of all of the great protagonists with two personalities. Clark Kent and Superman. Bruce Banner and the Hulk. Tyler Durden and...Tyler Durden? He may be no superhero--even with his superhuman power of persuasion--and his two identities, the mild-mannered everyman and the anarchist time bomb, are so different he thinks he's two different people.
Our society affects our identity. The Tyler side of the Narrator's mind (violent, mischievous, anarchistic) is harshly looked down upon by society. Therefore, the Narrator must distance himself to stay alive in this day and age. It is only when he meets Marla Singer, a kindred spirit of obsequious chaos, that Tyler starts to come forth. Then, when Marla shows favor for the Narrator's personality, Tyler sees fit to destroy the Narrator to keep Marla. This shows how people cling to others like them because we need similar minds to avoid being destroyed by society's adherence to the norm and suppression of anything different in order to keep, well, order. The Narrator shoots himself through the unhealed wound in his face courtesy of the Fight Club meetings. He wakes up in heaven ("In my father's house are many mansions..."), but heaven is not quite heaven. It's a hospital, as evidenced from the "quiet, rubber-soled shoes", "meals on a tray with a paper cup of meds", and a God that's "behind his desk, taking notes on a pad." When he shot himself, he received the death he's longed for throughout the novel ("I prayed for a crash...","This is the amazing miracle of death..."), but without all the permanent side effects (like death). Despite destroying the Tyler part of his brain when he shot himself, he remains delusional. He truly believes that he is in heaven ("Marla's still on Earth.."), but the hospital is populated with Project Mayhem space monkeys who pass by him saying, "We miss you Mr. Durden. Everything's going according to plan. We look forward to getting you back." Even if (bold and italicized because that is left to interpretation) Tyler is dead, his ideologies live on. However, if you and I read the novel the same way, that's all he was in the first place.
In Scott McCloud's how-to graphic novel Understanding Comics, he coins the term "amplification through simplification" to define the tactic illustrators use involving the abstraction of character designs. This tactic, McCloud say, lets the audience fill the blank spaces of a fictional character's identity with the watcher's own. By projecting themselves into the story, the audience feels a sense of involvement that they would not feel otherwise. In the comics medium, this tactic can be used from 1980s manga to Alan Moore and David Lloyd's dystopian epic V for Vendetta, in which amplification through simplification becomes a key factor to the novel's plot.
In written word, amplification through simplification is also achievable. Fight Club employs this tactic to full advantage. The Narrator isn't given an age or a name; he's given only a gender (male), a nationality (American), a working-class status, and a deep dissatisfaction with the world around him. Any other traits are left blank. By giving a wide gap for his reader to fill, Palahniuk essentially uses he or she as a character in his novel. Despite being his first published novel, it wasn't his first attempt. Invisible Monsters was rejected by every company he approached because they found it a tad bit too disturbing. Angered by this, Palahniuk set out to write something even more controversial. Fight Club's 1996 publishing was a kick in the teeth, distilling the frustrations of the American working class--specifically, the American working class male--into its purest, most primal essence, all because they see themselves as this character who is violently rebelling against their very same situation and rooted in the very same fears and vexations that they find in every day life. Due to the continuation of the institutions that undermine the working class, and partly due to the visual odyssey that is David Fincher's film translation of Fight Club (1999), it remains as relevant as ever and still packs a punch. |