Fight Club Essay free essay sample

From the Bottom Up One of the many central themes in Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club is the idea that one has to break themselves down in order to build themselves up. Joe, who serves as both the narrator and the protagonist in both the novel and film, finds himself unhappy in his consumerist life where the lines of gender roles are constantly being challenged and blurred. Joe is tortured by his work on a daily basis where he sees human lives being disregarded and turned into mere statistics with a dollar value attributed to them on a sheet of paper. This torture along with the strain of not being able to make any real human connections and relationships along with his confusion over his gender role in society lead to the creation of his alter ego, Tyler. Tyler is the exact opposite of Joe. In Terry Lee’s article â€Å"Virtual Violence in Fight Club: This Is What Transformation of Masculine Ego Feels Like†, he explains that Tyler â€Å"embodies Jack’s own repressed strengths, qualities that are useful, when contracted for short periods in the service of making transformative change, but which cannot be – or shouldn’t be – acted out in everyday life† (420). We will write a custom essay sample on Fight Club Essay or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page What Joe is seeking then is a balance in his life; something to give his life meaning and beauty. He creates Tyler, or rather lets him out, in order to achieve that balance and ends up finding himself in a battle between his two personas that manifests itself in the form of male fighting clubs. Joe teeter totters between his old self, the one he is trying to change, and Tyler who isn’t necessarily the change that he wants to become but rather the catalyst to the balance that he is trying to reach. Tyler delivers a constant message to Joe throughout both the novel and film, that is that if you want to exact change in yourself you have to forget everything you thought you knew about yourself and the life that you lead. Tyler tells Joe that he is nowhere near hitting the bottom yet and that if he doesn’t fall all the way that he can’t be saved (Palahniuk 70). Tyler starts Joe on his journey to the bottom by blowing up his apartment and telling him that, It’s only after you’ve lost everything that you’re free to do anything† (Fight Club). Having been socialized into his consumerist role as a man and confused as to how to express his masculinity his whole life, Joe is resistant to Tyler’s methods. Lee states that, â€Å"Jack needs to awaken from his consumer numbness, his deadened, emotionless life: the old Jack needs to die, so a new Jack can come to life† (420). In the film, Joe does not realize that he needs to let go of his old self completely in order to build a new better self until the very end at the cataclysmic moment when all of Tyler’s hard work is about to culminate in the explosions of several high-rise buildings. The realization that Tyler’s actions are about to become a reality, in the film adaptation of Fight Club, shocks Joe into finally accepting and exacting the change that he needed. He emerges from his inner battle with Tyler victorious and armed with a new consciousness. Ironically it was the narrator, Joe, who said that, â€Å"Only after disaster can we be resurrected† (Palahniuk 70). While it is clear that all Joe needed to do to find happiness, meaning, and beauty in his life was strike a balance between himself and his subconscious, Tyler, it is only fair to say that the reason things got so out of hand was that he was also suffering from several clinical illnesses. He not only undoubtedly suffered from insomnia and dissociative personality disorder but also was probably affected by depression and some degree of sociopathy. A normal, healthy person probably would have been able to make gradual changes in their life to achieve happiness.