Fight Club Analysis

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Bruce Hood explains, “illusions are experiences in the mind, but they are not out there in nature. Rather, they are events generated by the brain”. On parallel to Bruce Hood’s idea, in Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Tyler is an illusion generated by the narrator’s mind. He represents a way for the narrator to escape reality, to live a life opposite of his own. What does Tyler represent? Tyler seems to be everything that the narrator is not; he represents the suppressed aspects of the narrator’s personality. With no doubt, Tyler is the perfect man for the narrator, he is an exemplar of freedom and power, and it is exactly what is missing in the narrator’s life. Also, he is a primal, violent person who gets everybody’s attention when he is in a room; he seems to be always right. Palahniuk writes, “I know this, because Tyler knows this” (112): it emphasizes how the narrator considers Tyler as a forceful and smart person - even, a dogmatist. Tyler is fascinating and motivated; he has the ideas, and the narrator follows. He is a manipulator who transforms people as he wants them to be; he creates an anti consumerism, against materialism team through ‘Fight Clubs’. As the narrator asserts, “Tyler didn’t care if other people got hurt or not. The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history” (Palahniuk, 122). In Tyler's opinion, a person needs to be remembered in History- a person lost in modern society with no identity has no value in living his life. Therefore, he manipulates and changes people that have difficulties to live a consistent, exciting and happy life – easy targets. He focuses on their weaknesses and creates in them a new desire: the desire to create their own history. He turns these men into ‘space monkeys’ and that becomes Tyler’s greatest strength. He, consequently, creates a terrorist group who has anarchists’ plans.
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