Published in 1996, Chuck Palahniuk’s satirical novel Fight Club tells the story of an insomniac with a seemingly perfect life, but who is driven to attend numerous random support groups due to his fatigue and half-asleep half-awake state of mind. The book was also adapted into a movie starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt in 1999. I decided to read this novel because I already owned the paperback but never actually managed read it until the end.
The protagonist of the book is left unnamed but is usually referred to as ‘the Narrator’ outside the book. Sometimes the readers of the novel have called him Joe (or Jack if you prefer the film) because of the way the Narrator speaks of himself, ”I am Joe’s Complete Lack of Surprise”. The anonymity of the main character is likely meant to make it easier for the reader to identify with him, to strengthen the image of him being modern society’s average man.
The other main character is Tyler Durden who’s an exact opposite of the Narrator: a reckless extremist who’s only standard for people is their ability to ‘hit bottom’. After their meeting, the Narrator slowly begins to feel drawn to him. And of course there’s Marla Singer, the curious woman whom our protagonist encounters at a testicular cancer support group. Instantly, he recognizes her as a person who doesn’t really belong there, a person just like him.
In the presence of Marla, another support group ‘tourist’, the Narrator can no longer project his feelings, which leads to his insomnia to return immediately. Guided by Tyler, he learns how to cure his sleeplessness through fighting instead. As a result, the two of them set up a fight club in a basement of a bar. There they and other men relax, as insane as it sounds, by beating each other until the other begs to his opponent to stop.
The book is often misunderstood to be only about fighting, which it definitely is not, but what is it about then? Well even for me who has seen the movie a few times and now even read the book, the question is really hard to answer. There seems to be a great number of various ways to explain the message of Fight Club.
To me the story is about a man bored with his stressful job and unpleasant life. Subconsciously, the man makes a decision to change his life. In a way Fight Club is about growing up, not necessarily becoming an adult but evolving as a human being. It’s also about the absurdness of a materialistic lifestyle; in the long run, material things don’t matter because someday we’re all going to be dead, or like it’s said in the book, “The things you used to own, now they own you.”
But Fight Club is also about opposites. Whilst Fight Club does look down on people who dedicate their whole lives to their dull meaningless jobs and Swedish furniture collections, it’s also supposed to make the reader condemn the rebellious and violent acts the men of fight club do, not to mention their ridiculous devotion to the club resembling a religious cult.
Then there are the Narrator’s new lifestyle choices that at first glance look very promising, but not all of them turn out to be the best ones, neither is that something we can blame only on our protagonist since one of the story’s main themes is mental illness. Though that’s not something I can go too much into detail without spoiling the climax of the plot.
The language of the book is rather peculiar. At first some parts of the text felt a bit out of space; there are a lot of time jumps and weird scene changes, making it feel like you were reading a movie script. “Freeze. Drop the weapon. This was better than life. On his hand was a scar from my kiss.” I read the afterword where the author says he wanted to find a way to just cut and jump from scene to scene without losing the reader, and I think he managed to do that; to find the way and not lose the reader.
No wonder they made such a good film out of it.
Everything is also told from the Narrator’s point of view, obviously since we call him ‘the Narrator’. What makes the writing style really interesting though, is the lack of actual lines delivered by the main character. Nothing the Narrator says is put between quotation marks, which makes most of the text seem like an inner monologue. Here’s an extract of the text that proves my point: “I’m counting on my fingers: five, seven, five. The blood, is it mine? Yeah, I say. Some of it. This is a wrong answer.”
The overall reading experience was alright. Reading in English was nothing new for me. I just usually don’t read a lot of novels, whatever the language, so it took some time for me to actually start enjoying it. After all I really liked it and now I’m just dying to watch the movie again.
I recommend this book to anyone who’s not afraid of harsh, violence-describing language, or if you are like me and prefer filmography, go watch the movie. I promise the plot is going to blow your mind.