The Near Life Experience An ass-kicking interpretation of Chuck Palahniuk’s self-help novel FIGHT CLUB By Dan Bergevin
Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 debut novel Fight Club has been interpreted in many ways, all depending on the perspective of the reader. There are enough interpretations to fill a book, and indeed they do (see You Do Not Talk About Fight Club by Benbella Books for 16 examples). Unfortunately, most of these interpretations are skewed by the feature film, directed by David Fincher and released in 1999. And many of these interpretations completely miss the point. But perhaps I’m the one missing the point. However, if I am interpreting Fight Club with any amount of objective analysis, the point seems blatantly clear. And the more I read the book, the more I arrive at the same conclusion:
Fight Club is the greatest self-help book of the 20th Century. And why shouldn’t I arrive at this conclusion? Let’s be honest, the self-help books of the 20th Century weren’t exactly conducive to the types of crap most modern people have to deal with. So we ended up with books that hyped how wonderful life could be if you only believed in a better life. We ended up with books that implored us to write positive affirmations, to think positive thoughts 24-7, and to visualize all the positive things we want so we can manifest it in reality. Fight Club isn’t like that. And for that reason (amongst others, no doubt), many will argue that it wasn’t intended to be a self-help book. And maybe they’re right. But it’s much more useful when interpreted as one, and choosing the most useful interpretation for anything certainly isn’t a bad approach to anything in life. So where should this interpretation start? Well...
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Once upon a time,
there was a man who worked as the recall campaign coordinator for a nameless car manufacturer. He travels all the time, all over the country. His job is to determine if the cost of a recall exceeds the cost of lawsuits. If it does, his company won’t initiate a recall. Sure, people might die from some malfunctioning part, but dammit this is about the bottom line, not about humanitarianism. This man, who is our story’s narrator, isn’t your typical businessperson. He’s pretty much tired of it all, which a lot of people are, but he’s a bit more nihilistic about it than others. When he is traveling, he hopes his plane will tear apart and crash. If he dies, then nothing matters. Not his job, not his furniture, not his habits. In those final moments before death, his bills and clothes and personal issues vaporize, only to return when the plane lands safely and death is averted. He finds freedom in these moments where death is right at hand, and when they are over, the shackles of his life return. Our narrator is paid well. He has a nice condo and a nice car. He has great business perks. But this isn’t working for him. And not just in some temporary dissatisfaction kind of way - he is losing sleep over his lifestyle. A lot of sleep. In fact, you could say he doesn’t sleep at all. He wants drugs. His doctor tells him no, he just needs some exercise. His doctor tells him, you want to see people who have it bad, go to a support group for people with terminal illnesses. So our narrator goes. Funny how things work out sometimes. We can often find the most liberating thoughts and feelings in the most desperate and hopeless of places. And our narrator finds exactly that. And through these support groups, our narrator discovers his cure for insomnia: crying. The tears flow when he embraces those who suffer illnesses he doesn’t have, and may never know firsthand. Group hugs and guided meditations, in the presence of those far worse off than himself, is his only therapy from the deleterious effects of his unfulfilling career and consumer lifestyle. 2
Crying is right at hand in the smothering dark, closed inside someone else, when you see how everything you can ever accomplish will end up as trash. Anything you’re ever proud of will be thrown away. And I’m lost inside. This is as close as I’ve been to sleeping in almost a week. And when the meetings are over, he goes home and sleeps like a baby. This arrangement is clearly working out for him. But this is all interrupted when Marla Singer comes around. She’s in all his support groups. What the hell does she think she’s doing? She even comes to the prostate cancer support group. What a shameless fake. Our narrator cannot cry when Marla is present. The knowledge that she’s faking illness in order to achieve the therapeutic effects of near death just ruins the whole experience for him. And he cannot achieve lostness if she is there to remind him that it’s not real for him either, that it’s just a placebo. So his insomnia returns. But how can he convince her to stop coming to “his” support groups? What is her reason for being a faker, a phony, a liar?
All her life, she never saw a dead person. There was no real sense of life because she had nothing to contrast it with. Oh, but now there was dying and death and loss and grief. Weeping and shuddering, terror and remorse. Now that she knows where we’re all going, Marla feels every moment of her life. Well, our narrator can’t dispute that. So he and Marla agree to split the support groups. Everything’s kosher now, right? Well, the support groups didn’t really fix anything. They just bring our narrator closer to freedom without actually giving it to him. So he remains stuck in his career.
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. And he remains stuck in his lifestyle, a self-confessed slave to his nesting instinct.
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 3
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. This all seems pretty bleak, and our narrator seems like he’s stuck, jammed onto a set of tracks he hates, screaming headlong toward a destination he wants to avoid. Then he meets Tyler Durden. Tyler, the movie projectionist and banquet waiter. Tyler, who splices pornographic frames into children’s movies and contaminates haute cuisine with his bodily fluids as a waiter at the Pressman Hotel. Our narrator meets him on a beach, at some undisclosed location, as he attempts to recuperate from his Standard Mode of Existence. Tyler seems interested in only one thing - using the moment you have right now to create perfection. Yes, that perfection will fall apart. But imagine, if you could have perfection for only one moment, you would have it for longer than most people ever do.
One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection. Tyler gives our narrator his number, and they go their own ways. What our narrator has not yet realized is that Tyler is a dream, his dream. But Tyler’s no ordinary dream. He is fully capable of acting on his ideals, which is was most real people are capable of without realizing it. And therein lies Tyler’s power - since he is a dream, he lacks the inhibitions that are both a blessing and a curse for most people.
If I could wake up in a different place, at a different time, could I wake up as a different person? Our narrator discovers the power Tyler holds over him when he returns from a business trip, only to find that his condo has exploded.
I loved my life. I loved that condo. I loved every stick of furniture. That 4
was my whole life. Everything, the lamps, the chairs, the rugs were me. The dishes in the cabinet were me. It was me that blew up. The obliteration of our narrator’s “nest” leaves him with only one option: call Tyler. So he calls. And they meet at a bar. And Tyler agrees to let our narrator stay with him at his house on Paper Street, which happens to be a dilapidated, abandoned structure on the verge of total collapse. It’s perfect. But first, Tyler wants our narrator to do him a favor. Tyler wants him to hit him as hard as he can. Our narrator hits him. Naturally, Tyler hits him back. They hit each other again, and they both like where this is going. Wait. How can this be happening? Doesn’t our narrator realize that Tyler isn’t real? No, he doesn’t. He cannot, for it is only through another consciousness that our narrator feels he can achieve freedom.
I am nothing in the world compared to Tyler. I am helpless. I am stupid, and all I do is want and need things. So when our narrator hits Tyler, and Tyler hits him back, what’s really going on? Well, our narrator is really just hitting himself.
“You weren’t really fighting me,” Tyler says. “You said so yourself. You were fighting everything you hate in your life.” And this is how fight clubs starts. Because Tyler and our narrator aren’t the only ones interested in freedom through primal aggression. So others join in. And soon, it’s a weekly event, drawing those disenchanted by their daily lives, those who are drawn to the freedom that fight club offers.
Most guys are at fight club because of something they’re too scared to fight. After a few fights, you’re afraid a lot less. Nothing was solved when fight club was over, but nothing mattered. Fight club is about feeling alive. It’s about self-destruction and the elimination of 5
possessions and career plans. Through fight club, the destruction of all limitations will set you free. Through fight club, you can realize that being perfect is not the answer. Through fight club you become alive in a primal sense, not in the salariedwalking-dead sort of way.
I just don’t want to die without a few scars, I say. It’s nothing anymore to have a beautiful stock body. You see those cars that are completely stock cherry, right out of a dealer’s showroom in 1955, I always think, what a waste. But everything, the support groups, the fight clubs, the complete disregard for self-preservation, is blown to pieces when Tyler meets Marla. Marla is attempting suicide, and calls our narrator to see if he would like to come and watch. He declines the offer, and attends one of his support groups instead. Then he goes to bed early. So when Marla calls back, saying she’s almost there, saying she’s passing through the tunnel to the light at the very end, Tyler is the one who picks up the phone. And Tyler, unlike our narrator, wants to save Marla Singer.
I know why Tyler had occurred. Tyler loved Marla. From the first night I met her, Tyler or some part of me had needed a way to be with Marla. Marla is Tyler’s salvation, and Tyler is our narrator’s salvation. This would all work out just great, except our narrator hates Marla. Tyler represents the polar opposite of what our narrator’s life has become. And through the violent negation of everything normal in his life, our narrator achieves freedom. This freedom is an illusion, however, as Marla wants Tyler and our narrator wants Tyler, yet Tyler doesn’t really exist. Our narrator wants a piece of himself that he cannot achieve in his own conscious life, and it is this piece of himself that Marla wants as well. Thus, the desire to overcome all desires cannot itself be overcome, and the binds of attachment can never be fully severed, for both our narrator and for Marla. Our narrator and Marla both think they need Tyler. So our narrator resents Marla, and Marla resents his resentment. After all, how can any of this make sense to 6
her? To her, our narrator is Tyler, but to our narrator, Marla is a threat to the freedom he attains through Tyler. One night he’s Tyler, and Marla is given his full attention. The next morning he isn’t Tyler, and he wants her gone forever. Our narrator, feeling as if Marla is destroying the only freedom he really has, retaliates passively at work. With haiku poems.
Without just one nest A bird can call the world home Life is your career This is the opposite of what Tyler would do. Tyler would retaliate against any threat to his freedom openly, with focused aggression. Like the radiation treatment of a tumor, he would kill the threat without any regard for the collateral damage inflicted to the surrounding areas.
“If you lose your nerve before you hit the bottom,” Tyler says, “you’ll never really succeed.” “It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Tyler says, “that you’re free to do anything.” And hitting bottom, losing everything, is exactly what Tyler is planning to do. Our narrator’s insomnia is back, but he is starting to question if he’s asleep or not. He’s starting to talk like Tyler. He’s even starting to look like Tyler.
Tyler and I were looking more and more like identical twins. Both of us had punched-out cheekbones, and our skin had lost its memory, and forgot where to slide back to after we were hit. And he’s starting to wonder about this whole fight club thing. Because, you see, they are sprouting up all over town, like weeds in the cracks of sidewalks. It is no longer just a Saturday night thing in the basement of a local dive bar. It’s now a nightly event, held in multiple locations across town. But like any enterprising franchise chain, it needs financing. 7
Fight club finance method #1:
Extort the movie projectionist union and the Pressman Hotel by threatening to go pubic with all the horrible things Tyler and our narrator have done (subliminal pornography in children’s movies and pee in the crab bisque... think of the kind of publicity that will bring in!).
Fight club finance method #2:
Go entrepreneurial, using whatever materials are readily at hand. So Tyler starts making soap, and the Paper Street Soap Company is now open for business. The best soap is made from all natural materials. Natural scents, natural oils. Like the oils found in fat. And the best fat is animal fat. But not all animal fat works. Chicken fat is too salty. Human fat, though, is just right. Marla’s mom mails her any excess fat she accumulates, so Marla can use it for collagen injections. She’s saving up, and she’s storing it in Tyler’s freezer. So Tyler raids Marla’s collagen supply. And as he doesn’t want to see a good source run dry, he mails Marla’s mom boxes of chocolates. Keep it coming. Marla finds out, and is understandably upset. Our narrator blames Tyler. Now Marla is both pissed off and very confused. How can our narrator possibly blame someone else for turning Marla’s mother into soap when that “someone else” is the same person as our narrator? Clearly, our narrator is the one who is truly confused. But while our narrator continues to piss off Marla and wallow in self-loathing and jealousy, Tyler is hard at work. Tyler is into something new now. He has realized that fight club isn’t the answer. It’s too tame, too passive. So he starts a little side project called Project Mayhem. And now, rather than men beating each other up in bars and garages, these same men are vandalizing buildings, burning down public parks, and injecting ATMs with vanilla pudding.
When Tyler invented Project Mayhem, Tyler said the goal of Project Mayhem had nothing to do with other people. Tyler didn’t care if other people 8
got hurt or not. The goal was to teach each man in the project that he had the power to control history. We, each of us, can take control of the world. Little by little, with every act of vandalism and violence, Project Mayhem gains momentum. It’s a giant, dirty snowball that grows bigger and dirtier with each act it performs. Random acts of social deviancy are no longer deviations – they are the new norm. Oh, and they’re not random, either. Tyler isn’t just setting himself free by hitting bottom. If he can force the entire human race to hit bottom, he can force it to save itself from self-imposed extinction.
“I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions,” Tyler whispered, “because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.” Self-preservation through self-destruction. It’s too radical of an idea to propose to society, so it must be forced on them.
It’s Project Mayhem that’s going to save the world. A cultural ice age. A prematurely induced dark age. Project Mayhem will force humanity to go dormant or into remission long enough for the Earth to recover. Who said Tyler didn’t have goals and objectives? Project Mayhem becomes the new solution. And rather than individuals trying to free themselves, those individuals are now trying to free the world. Project Mayhem has different committees – Arson, Assault, Mischief, etc.
Support groups. Sort of. To get on a committee, you have to graduate out of fight club. Fight club is no longer the solution, it is the entrance exam. So now, joining fight club is no longer about taking out your aggression. It’s about taking over the world. But how do you take over a world that doesn’t want to be conquered? How do you make people join a movement that they don’t even know exists?
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The Assault Committee of Project Mayhem has a homework assignment: Pick a fight with a stranger, and let the stranger win. By doing so, these strangers learn not to be afraid to fight back, and they learn what it feels like to win. They gain a little piece of themselves back from the politically correct world. And by losing the fear that holds them back from their own capabilities, they are drawn closer to the world Tyler is creating. Here’s another Project Mayhem homework assignment: make a human sacrifice. But this sacrificial person doesn’t have to die, only be reborn. So here’s the trick – force random people to choose what they really want to do with their lives, and immediately begin doing it. If they refuse, they die. The Project Mayhem member will check on them periodically and if they lapse, they die. This isn’t optional. Oddly enough, for some people, it takes the immediate and very real possibility of death for them to admit to what they want to do. And it takes the threat of extinction for them to gain the motivation to actually pursue it.
“Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don’t need. We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives.” Then, one day, Tyler’s gone. And everywhere our narrator looks for Tyler, he finds new fight clubs. Every city he visits has them, and every one of them is run by people who already know who he is. But he has never met them before. But Tyler has. And as the fight clubs grow, so does Project Mayhem. And our narrator realizes that this whole time, he was Tyler Durden.
The first time I met Tyler, I was asleep. I was tired and crazy and rushed, and every time I boarded a plane, I wanted the plane to crash. I envied people dying of cancer. I hated my life. I was tired and bored with my job and my furniture, and I couldn’t see any way to change things. ...I’m not sure if Tyler is my dream. Or if I am Tyler’s dream. He is the reason why Marla Singer keeps coming back, despite his attempts to 10
convince her otherwise. He is the reason why his condo and is car and his career have been annihilated and replaced with a global anarchist movement. So here he is: Tyler Durden... our narrator. Up to his eyeballs in fight club and Project Mayhem chapters. Acolytes are everywhere. They drive the buses he rides, they cook the food he eats. They are the people he passes everyday on the streets and the policemen who patrol them. He finally realizes that enslavement to a job he hates won’t make him happy, but destruction of civilization isn’t the answer either. There has to be a middle ground. But our narrator cannot convince fight club members to go home and find something else to do. Television and junk food can no longer fill the void for them. And he cannot prevent the acts of destruction that Project Mayhem is planning. He can only kill Tyler. Somehow, he managed to do this, by shooting himself in the face. And while he survives, Tyler does not. So what now? He can’t go back to his corporate day job - he blew up the building he worked in and killed his boss. He can’t reintegrate into society - he’s developed a bit of a reputation as a dangerous sociopath. And although he’s converted most of the world into dangerous sociopaths as well, he’s bound to encounter some opposition to his freedom. And so the story ends, with our narrator in an undisclosed location, undergoing mental evaluation. But the nurses administer his medication while sporting black eyes and broken jaws. The janitors whisper of “everything going according to plan.” Our narrator knows it isn’t over. He is merely the legend that started the movement. And he can’t stop it now, because it doesn’t need him anymore.
In a hundred cities, fight club goes on without me.
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And here, dear reader, is where we arrive at the moral of the story. One extreme in life is unfettered consumerism, neediness, and total helplessness. This is the extreme where our narrator finds himself. He doesn’t know a way out that doesn’t involve death. So he is left with no choice - die or reinvent himself. And as the death he seeks through his support groups is merely a temporary one, he becomes Tyler Durden, a person his conscious inhibitions hold no sway over.
At the time, my life just seemed too complete, and maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves. The other extreme is complete self-reliance, independence, and absolute defiance of all that stands in the way. This is where Tyler Durden stands. His blatant opposition of everything civil, of anything that represents a thread in the social bonds that holds humanity together, was a bond in itself. But Tyler didn’t care. He wanted to escape, and was willing to totally enmesh himself in his own methods of escape in order to do so.
“The liberator who destroys my property,” Tyler said, “is fighting to save my spirit. The teacher who clears all possessions from my path will set me free.” The paradox represented by our narrator and Tyler’s coexistence represents an uncompromising polarization of the world, with the former seeking comfort in buying things and being owned by them, and the other sought comfort in the incineration of these things via homemade napalm. It is only through Marla that the two sides of our narrator have any real grounding in each other. Seeking either extreme is a trap. And sometimes, the realization that it is a trap can easily come when it is too late to change course.
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So what’s the moral of the story? Life isn’t about extremes. We can seek absolute freedom, only to become ensnared in the very methods we use to break free. We can rebel against the things we are attached to, only to find ourselves rebelling against the things that grounded us in our very sense of self. Being unhappy in your job and in your lifestyle, feeling trapped by your nesting instinct and suffocated by your constant searching for something, anything, that can fill a gap in your life, is no better. For if we find ourselves on either extreme, the tendency is to sway too far in the opposite direction, and inflict even more damage on an already unbalanced life. We must be willing to seek ground between absolute freedom and a totally zombified existence.
Is it the most beautiful and positive story ever told? Hell no. But it’s a very accurate portrayal of what most people deal with in their lives. And accuracy, even when it is brutally, uncompromisingly honest, is far more liberating than any false sense of security, any pursuit of the perfect life. Perfection is, at best, a fleeting moment. And when you catch that moment, savor it, then move on. For everything will continue to fall apart, and it isn’t a tragedy or a cause for celebration. It just is. And the sooner you can come to terms with this, the sooner you can discover who the real you is.
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Copyright Š 2010 by Daniel Bergevin All rights to content reserved by Daniel Bergevin. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in any retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or by similar or dissimilar methods now known or developed in the future, without written permission of the publisher, except for brief excerpts in connection with reviews or scholarly analysis. Published by Capitalized Living Post Office Box 2172, Layton, Utah, 84041
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