Fight Club explores the big question that all great literature does: what do I have to do to feel most fully human? There are elements of Thoreauvian solitude, Puritanical rules, and the chaos of anarchy and adulterated freedom. As Tyler Durden ventures down each path, the irony and paradox becomes apparent—life is most fully lived when it is conscious of its limitations, brevity, and imminent end. Therefore, the narrator concludes, the confrontation with death (a la Hemingway) is what allows us to feel most alive at any point.
Likewise, the paradox of Project Mayhem is that it is tightly controlled, a machine with many cogs that duplicates the capitalistic society it is so angry about. Philosophically its participants have exchanged leaders because they think Fight Club offers more freedom, but their situation is ultimately not improved.
In the endnote Palahniuk gives some good insights, including the awareness of gender in the book and its unabashed masculinity. Durden says, “What you see at fight club is a generation of men raised by women.” They are all, then, reclamation projects.
It’s an odd love story, but it gets inside the conflictedness that the narrator has as he tries to estimate himself in Marla’s eyes. He is inadequate and suave, unlikeable and ravishing. He is consistently divided about his life and where his passions lie, always knowing what it is he wants (to quit this job) and always unable to follow through with it because he’s afflicted with the modern malaise (see Binx Bolling, Richard Yates, Ethan Frome, and Prufrock for characters with similar conflicts) of what he calls “the tiny life”.
The book’s stream of conscious style is mesmerizing. It lands body blow after body blow, circling back upon itself a crazy quilt of patterned randomness. It is organized chaos, true to Tyler Durden’s wishes.
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