Fight Club - Book review (0)

BOOK REPORT
Title of the book: Fight Club
Author (name and some general information): Chuck Palahniuk is an American novelist born February 21, 1962 in Washington, USA. He is best known as the author for the novel Fight Club (1996), which was made into a movie in 1999. Palahniuk began writing fiction in his mid-thirties. When he attempted to publish his novel, Invisible Monsters, publishers rejected it for its disturbing content. This led him to work on Fight Club which he wrote as an attempt to disturb the publisher even more for rejecting him. After initially publishing it as a short story in the 1995 compilation, Pursuit of Happiness, Palahniuk expanded it into a full novel, which—contrary to his expectations —the publisher was willing to publish. Some other well-known novels: Rant, Choke, Diary.
Analysis of the book

Setting
The story takes place in somewhere between 1980s and 1990s in the United States.

Characters

• Main character / narrator – His name is never mentioned in the novel. He works as a product recall specialist for a car manufacturing company, traveling from city to city, assessing the damages of car crashes. He describes his job in such a way that makes it sound complex when it actually is not. “If a new car built by my company leaves Chicago traveling west at 60 miles per hour , and the rear differential locks up, and the car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside, does my company initiate a recall? You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of- court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall. If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt. If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall.” He is unhappy with his job and is suffering from depression and insomnia .
  
• Tyler Durden – He works at nights, having multiple part -time and short-term jobs like a waiter or a freelance projectionist, sabotaging the companies he Works for. He introduces himself to the main character as a soap salesman , which is also one of his jobs, saying he makes and sells soap. In the end of the story, the main character’s and Tyler’s paths part and Tyler turns on him.
  
• Marla Singer – The main character meets Marla in one of the support groups he goes to. Just like he, Marla is also a faker. She joins many support groups, including all of which the narrator goes to. Marla is described as a very dark and shady person , also uncaring and suicidal. She later becomes Tyler’s girlfriend.
  
• Angel Face – He was one of the men who joined fight club later, when it was already “popular”. He is very loyal to the founders if the fight club, increasing his importance over time. He is later chosen to be a part of Project Mayhem.
  
• Robert “Bob” Paulson – The main character meets Bob in a support group for men with testicular cancer , which was also the first support group he joined. Bob is a former bodybuilder and he used big amounts of steroids in the form of testosterone. In order to keep his hormones in balance, his body also raised the production of estrogen, causing him to later develop a softer, more woman -like voice and grow large “ bitch tits”, which they are referred to as in the book.
  

Main problem/conflict
A product recall specialist, suffering from severe depression and insomnia, travels from place to place, overlooking accidents, assessing and deciding whether or not the car manufacturing company should initiate a recall or not.
As he’s struggling with insomnia he feels like nothing is real . “You’re not sleeping, but you’re not really awake”, as he describes it. He seeks for help from his doctor , asking him for sleeping pills, but instead the doctor suggests him more natural means like chewing ginger. When the main character begs him, saying he’s in pain and suffering, the doctor suggests him to join a support group to see what real pain and suffering is like.
He joins a support group for men with testicular cancer, despite not having cancer himself, where he meets Bob. The narrator feels better after hearing about others coping with their problem and strangely enough, he could sleep after the session. After the first session he started going to every meeting and soon enough he started looking for more and more support groups as a weird psychological therapy to fill the entire week. He used different fake names in different support groups.
After a while , the narrator begins to notice a woman who had begun to join each and every one of his support groups. He knew she was a faker and she knew about him. When she was present , he couldn’t cry and therefore he couldn’t sleep. After a meeting in the testicular cancer support group, they started talking and she introduced herself to him as Marla Singer.
Later on, the narrator met a guy named Tyler Durden on a beach, as he introduced himself as a soap manufacturer and salesman. Tyler gave him his card and left . When the main character got back from another business trip, he noticed police cars and fire trucks around his apartment building and as he approached the doorman, he told him that there had been an explosion in his apartment. The police thought that he had forgotten the gas on his stove on, which had filled the entire room over time and as the refrigerator turned on, a spark from the engine had ignited the gas, resulting in an explosion. He meets up with Tyler, asking him if he could stay at his place. Tyler agrees on one condition : “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” He explains himself by saying, that he doesn’t want to die without a single scar . From that moment the fight club was born.
The narrator moved in with Tyler into an abandoned house on Paper Street . They occasionally fought in the parking lot of a bar, attracting other men to join in. Later they had fights in the basement of the same bar.
Tyler set up a set of rules for fight club:

You don’t talk about fight club.

You don’t talk about fight club.

When someone says “stop“, goes limp or taps out the fight is over.

Only two guys to a fight.

One fight at a time.

They fight without shirts or shoes .

The fights go on as long as they have to.

If this is your fight night at fight club, you have to fight.

• Nobody is the center of the fight club except for the two men fighting.
  
• Fight club will always be free.
  

The rules were set in order to keep the fight club a secret .
While more and more fight clubs start showing up all over the country , expanding everywhere , Tyler start a new group of people, choosing the most loyal and bravest from the fight club. He calls it “Project Mayhem”.
Project Mayhem is a cult-like organization, in which they play violent pranks on random industries. The objective of Project Mayhem is to bring down modern civilization and consumerism. The narrator soon becomes unhappy with the vastly increasing destructiveness of Project Mayhem as he eventually tries to stop Tyler and his followers after Bob is killed during an operation of Project Mayhem.
In the end, the narrator realizes Tyler is not real and he’s all just his own imagination. The narrator has multiple personality disorder . Although he has realized it, Tyler is still there, so he puts a gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger in attempt to kill Tyler.
He wakes up at a mental institute, thinking he’s dead and he describes the place as it’s heaven: the manager is described as god, the workers as angels. There is no sign of Tyler. Some of the workers are also members of fight club and they occasionally whisper things like “we look forward to getting you back” or “we miss you, Mr. [Tyler] Durden” while passing by him.

Language (list of words or expressions frequently used by the author)
You wake up at (location); God; I admire …; This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time; This was freedom Losing all hope was freedom; We just are; Wipe your ass with the Mona Lisa.

Character analysis: Choose one main character from the book and answer the questions below
Name: Tyler Durden
Appearance and personality: He is very laid back and rebellious, doesn’t care about materialistic values. He is medium height and has a muscular build.
Compare yourself to this character: I think I have a similar way of thinking with Tyler, of course not so extreme . I often find myself asking others’ opinions about existential questions.
Did you like this character? Why/why not? Overall I liked this character already because of the idea of having a character in the book that didn’t exist in the real world, as he was just the narrator’s imagination. I liked his rebellious and out of the box thinking, but he was stubborn and bossy at times.

Did you like the book? Would you recommend it to your classmates? Why/why not?
I liked the book very much because of its violent and anarchistic ideas. Personally I thought the book was going to be a lot longer since the movie was over 2 hours long, and I wish the book was longer.
I would recommend this book to my classmates, but more to the guys, unless some of the girls have a somewhat weird love for extreme violence.