I had an inexplicable (maybe not so much) urge to reread this book because good news, it's AWESOME! I can never decide whether this or Invisible Monsters is my favourite Palahniuk book. I mean, Invisible Monsters is so good, but this is his first and ahhhh...
So I'm sure you've heard of this book. More likely than not, you saw the movie. At the very least, you've heard the first rule about Fight Club: don't talk about fight club. Pretty much a nobody office worker meets a guy named Tyler Durden. Tyler Durden is charismatic, interesting, rebellious--the narrator even says that Tyler is pretty much everything he wants to be. Which makes sense--but I'll spoil that later. And by the way, if you somehow don't know the ending, do not spoil it for yourself. Straight up read it. Doooo it.
So let's start!
So it starts out with the almost final scene--a lot like Invisible Monsters, actually, since if I recall that starts out with the scene that's second to last and the final scene is in the hospital... Sooo... Yeah. Anyways, this second-to-last scene is Tyler with a gun in the narrator's mouth. Tyler assures him that "'This isn't really death... We'll be legend. We won't grow old'" (11). The narrator tells Tyler that he's thinking of vampires. It's just kind of funny. Also, you're now thinking of Achilles. HAH!
"It's so quiet this high up, the feeling you get is that you're one of those space monkeys. You do the little job you're trained to do. Pull a lever. Push a button. You don't understand any of it, and then you just die" (12).
"That old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, look, it works both ways" (13).
"Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?" (15). I want to say Palahniuk goes into this a little more in Choke or something, but I could just be thinking of Desperation by Stephen King. Anyways, at the time I originally read this, this just about blew my mind.
"It's easy to cry when you realize that everyone you love will reject you or die. On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero" (17).
"This is how it is with insomnia. Everything is so far away, a copy of a copy of a copy. The insomnia distance of everything, you can't touch anything and nothing can touch you" (21). Okay, I'm going to back up and be a good book blogger here. The insomnia is how it all starts out. The narrator (who, by the way, is never named) hasn't slept for about three weeks and he begs his doctor to give him pills. The doctor refuses, and tells him if he wants to see real suffering, he should go to support groups--cancer support group, parasite support groups, and other groups for various mostly fatal diseases support groups. The narrator sort of... He doesn't exactly get off on it, but he starts feeling really alive afterwards. He loves it. He goes to all the support groups, and his insomnia seems to have cleared up, and all seems to be peaches and cream. Like he says--"This is better than real life" (22). Unfortunately, Marla Singer shows up. With her there he can't let go and cry with the dying people, and thus he can't sleep. After suffering like this again, he plans to tell her to bugger off, and this is around the time Tyler shows up.
Like was said, Tyler is charismatic, handsome, all of that... And they become fast friends. They move in together (they met on a business trip, and when the narrator came back, his apartment was quite exploded). Tyler explains some of his feelings about the world and all of that which I'll be parroting back to you soon enough, and he came up with the idea of fight club early on. But let's back up a bit, shall we?
So when he arrives at the airport he is first of all told that his razor went off and his bag and the bag had to be held up and checked for a bomb and all of that. Then he is told that his apartment was blown up. He's talking about all his Ikea furniture being blown up--"I wasn't the only slave to my nesting instinct. The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their IKEA furniture catalogue" (43). "You buy furniture. You tell yourself, this is the last sofa I will ever need in my life. Buy the sofa, then for a couple years you're satisfied that no matter what goes wrong, at least you've got your sofa issue handled. Then the right set of dishes. Then the perfect bed. The drapes. The rug. Then you're trapped in your lovely nest, and the things you used to own, now they own you" (44). On a lesser note: Settling for an Ikea sofa!? Ugh.
On the other hand, I just started thinking. I mean--it's almost a little.... Um, I can't think of the word. I don't think presumptuous fits. But it's almost a little something that the narrator would want this. Sure, who wants to be perfect, but still, then you see people sans limbs, or what have you... Then again, there's Brandy Alexander with her face blown off, and she's more than happy. Well, maybe not happy--but content. Satisfied. I guess it's more funny that the 'perfect' or at least healthy/normal people would want to destroy themselves, and mutilated people want the opposite (sometimes).
"What you see in fight club is a generation of men raised by women" (50).
"My father never went to college so it was really important that I go to college. After college, I called him long distance and said, now what? My dad didn't know. When I got a job and turned twenty-five, long distance, I said, now what? My dad didn't know, so he said, get married. I'm a thirty-year-old boy, and I'm wondering of another woman is really the answer I need" (51).
"At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves" (52). Again, Brandy Alexander and Shannon and all of that.
Marla. They talk. They trade numbers. One night the narrator calls her up and she says she's taken too many pills. She says she doesn't exactly mean to kill herself, that it's just "one of those cry-for-help things" (59). The narrator doesn't care. He goes to his support group, he goes to bed early. Tyler picks up the phone when she calls and goes to her. The two of them are up all night having sex, and the narrator dreams about it (only it's him, not Tyler, of course) all night. Anyway, after this night, Marla tells Tyler she wants to get pregnant and "have his abortion" (59). There's just something about that... Not disturbing, exactly, but weird. Unsettling, maybe? Disconcerting. That's the best I've got.
Oh, and Tyler called the cops before he went over to Marla's. Marla grabs Tyler to run out while the cops are trying to talk her out of suicide through the door to her empty room. Marla tells the police: "The girl who lives in 8G used to be a lovely charming girl, but the girl is a monster bitch monster... and she's confused and afraid to commit to the wrong thing so she won't commit to anything. 'The girl in 8G has no faith in herself,' Marla shouts, 'and she's worried that as she grows older, she'll have fewer and fewer options.' Marla shouts, 'Good luck'" (61).
So one day at fight club, there's a 'mister angel face', who I'm pretty sure plays a bigger part in the movie, but seeing him, the narrator goes half mad. "What Tyler says about being the crap and slaves of history, that's how I felt. I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I'd never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn't afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I'd never see. I wanted the whole world to hit rock bottom. Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground... For thousands of years, human beings had screwed up and trashed and crapped on this planet, and now history expected me to clean up after everyone. I have to wash out and flatten my soup cans. And account for every drop of used motor oil. And I have to foot the bill for nuclear waste and buried gasoline tanks and landfilled toxic sludge dumped a generation before I was born" (123-124).
Tyler reveals project mayhem that night to the narrator. He wants to destroy society basically--he tells the narrator to imagine that Seattle and NYC are rotting and rusting, that they've made an ex golf green into a farm of sorts, the remainders of mankind will use zoo cages as shelters from the released animals, having to hunt elk in what were once great cities... I think it's bulls--t. Completely. He wants the earth to recover. Maybe it's because the concept seems so impossible to me, but it just seems like utter crap. I think very easily the same society would rise, and history would pretty much repeat itself. I keep on thinking of Ayn Rand's Anthem. People would be wiped out if nothing else. The way I see it, people are so softened from the way we've been living for 200, 300 years, we literally can't survive out in the wild and such. Also, as a side note, "Colours of the Wind" came up on my shuffle. This is a really, really weird coincidence. And... It works strangely well. Woah.
I also think it's kind of funny in comparison to Invisible Monsters--I know, I won't shut up about that book but let it go for a second. One of my favourite scenes is when Seth is talking about the space needle and the "future via the 1960's" (I don't remember the exact page this is said, but it really stuck out to me, so...) He's talking about how people are giving their kids biblical names, soaking lentils for dinner, making their own shoes out of leather and all of that, and "they're walking around the ruins of the future the way barbarians did when they found Grecian ruins and told themselves that God must've built them" (99). Shannon says on the next page that "The future is just wasted on some people" (100). I don't think she's trying to be sarcastic or ironic or anything like that, but the elevator operator doesn't get how cool the future was supposed to be--how cool the future according to the sixties is. Maybe Tyler doesn't get it. Maybe he's pissed that that didn't work. Maybe he didn't even care. Maybe they're both thinking the same thing, it's just that their futures are so different. Either way, they were made by the same guy.
"'What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God... If you're male and you're Christian and you're living in America, your father is your model for God. And if you never know your father, if your father bails out or dies or is never at home, what do you believe about God? ...What you end up doing... is you spend your life looking for your father and God. What you have to consider... Is the possibility that God doesn't like you. Could be, God hates us. This is not the worst thing that can happen'" (140-141). I think this may be true even if you're female. It seemed like an interesting concept in theory, but when I really thought about it in relation to me, it sort of held water. It doesn't make sense in some extreme cases though...
"If you could be either God's worst enemy or nothing, which would you choose? ...Which is worse, hell or nothing?" (141).
"The lower you fall, the higher you'll fly. The farther you run, the more God wants you back... It's not enough to be numbered with the grains of sand on the beach and the stars in the sky" (141).
EDIT: You know what I just realized? The narrator tries so hard to break free of Tyler--and Tyler tries so hard to get him back. He doesn't want to be a part of fight club, and he doesn't want to be a space monkey... And Tyler maybe isn't God, but whoever is doing unto something or someone else might as well be God to them... I'm not saying it's a perfect fit, I just figure that I might as well point out the parallels.
"Oh, this is bullshit. This is a dream. Tyler is a projection. He's a disassociative personality disorder. A psychogenic fugue state. Tyler Durden is my hallucination. 'Fuck that shit,' Tyler says. 'Maybe you're my schizophrenic hallucination.' I was here first. Tyler says, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, well let's just see who's here last'" (168).
Ooooooops... There goes the non spoiler bit. Yeah, Tyler Durden is the narrator's alter-ego. The narrator describes Tyler as everything he's not--funny, charismatic, free, and so on--everything he wants to be. Which of course makes complete sense. He blames Marla for being the cause of Tyler's appearance--in some way he wanted her, kind of liked her. But he's not brave enough, cool enough, handsome enough or whatever enough to make a move on her or anything--maybe the real reason why his insomnia came back, why he didn't cry in front of her. He didn't want to seem weak in front of her, so he won't cry. Can't sleep because he's focused on her. Maybe? Okay, it's kind of weak but I'm writing this right now at 1 AM. Either way, it makes sense that he'd create his alter ego to be everything he's not and would want to be.
And while we're talking about the fact that TYLER DURDEN ISN'T REAL? When they fought in the parking lot that first time, the narrator says that after a while men started gathered around them and started shouting. Of course, you don't know that Tyler is a schizophrenic delusion then, so it seems like it's the normal crowd, egging two guys on. What it really is is the narrator beating himself up--so it makes sense that they would be yelling and freaking out. (But no-one did anything...?) And when Tyler has the gun in his mouth, the narrator explains that to anyone else it looks like he's holding the gun in his own mouth. I'd also want to mention that in that first fight, neither he (him?) nor Tyler kick each other. It's nearly impossible to kick yourself.
Then of course, when you realize that they're the same, all that repetition of "I know this because Tyler knows this" really makes sense.
"How everything you ever love will reject you or die. Everything you ever create will be thrown away. Everything you're proud of will end up as trash. I am Ozymandias, king of kings" (201).
Anyways. Here's me spoiling the end. He shoots himself. Now, I haven't seen the movie. Well--not all of it. I saw the first half, about. The only thing I really remember is the scene where the narrator's boss finds the fight club rules and Eddie Norton does an amazing job at giving the narrator's description of shooting up the office. Anyways, I believe the movie ends with the narrator actually shooting himself and the buildings exploding--keep in mind that I don't actually know. The book, however, has the shot--but the shot just rips up the other side of the narrator's face, and the buildings don't explode. (Well... It's implied that they didn't blow up.) There's one more chapter, too. It's kind of funny that it's not actually in the movie--well, if it isn't actually in the movie. In A Clockwork Orange, there's a kind-of sort-of epilogue chapter that covers Alex's life after he's been re-educated and released. He sees his old hellions as police men, married, grown ups--and starts wondering if it's maybe time for him to grow up too. It kind of takes away the steam of the book, I guess, and it was cut out of the movie, and even the original American printings of the book. This is kind of the same thing (in nature, at the very least). Tyler is gone, and we don't know if he'll come back. He's pretending he's dead, though really, he is in the hospital. He's referring to people as angels, and his psychiatrist as God in an effort to fool himself, even though he really truly knows that he is still alive.
"We are not special. We are not crap or trash, either. We just are. We just are, and what happens just happens. And God says, 'No, that's not right.' Yeah. Well. Whatever. You can't teach God anything" (207).
The ending wigs me out. Like I said, he's in the hospital, and there are orderlies who have black eyes, cut-up faces, missing teeth, shaved heads--the obvious signs of fight clubbers. It ends with an orderly saying that he can't wait to have him (/them) back.
There's also a brief afterward by Palahniuk, sort of a reflection bit. It makes sense, Fight Club took off--even now it's insanely popular, and this is more than ten years later.
First of all, there's a big section on people's reactions to it: a man asks what Palahniuk's takes on women's statuses in America today are, someone said the book was a failure because it didn't touch on racism, some people thought the book was actually about interpretative dance, watching gay men have sex, and so on. You get the feeling--or maybe it's just me projecting onto Palahniuk--that he thinks this is utterly ridiculous. I mean... Women don't come into play. They hardly even matter in the book. (I wrote 'anymore' originally--Freudian slip?) As for the racism bit, Palahniuk does mention it--he (Tyler Durden) says it doesn't matter if you're black or white anymore, the only thing that matters is how much money/power you've got.
Some people got mad, saying they invented fight clubs in boot camp, Depression labour camps... "There have always been fight clubs, they say. There will always be fight clubs. Waiters will always pee in soup. People will always fall in love"(217).
MLA Citation information: Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. Norton: United States of America, 2005.
So that's Fight Club! I guess it's easy to see that I love this book. It really is awesome; Palahniuk is really awesome too. I don't think this is his best book--but it's pretty amazing. It probably has the strongest voice out of all his books (that I've read, of course). I actually heard he published something just recently....?
Answer to last post's cryptic lyrics: Warrior by Matisyahu
This post's cryptic lyrics: I'm knitting with only one needle, unravelling fast it's true. I'm driving only three wheels these days--but my dear, how about you?
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