Fight Club: Book Review

The narrator of Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, leads a simple, but strange life. He spends most of his day working, and in the evenings he goes to various support groups, but not because he has any sort of debilitating disease, it’s because he cannot sleep. The narrator is an insomniac, and the only thing that helps him sleep is spend time with and to cry with the people from these support groups. It lets him get things out. After a while he notices another girl has been going to the same support groups, and he knows she is also lying about having these different diseases too. This is Marla. And she has broken his cycle, and he is back to his insomnia. And then the narrator meets Tyler Durden. Tyler who is unlike any other, who thinks that the narrator should stop going to his silly support groups and that he should solve his problems through beating Tyler up. And thus began Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is “you don’t talk about fight club”, the second rule of Fight Club is “you don’t talk about fight club” and so a new era begins, with men out there solving their own problems with a sort of scheduled violence (Palahniuk 48). But as people continue to break the first two rules of the club, the head count continues to expand, and so does Tyler’s power and so do his ideas. And so Tyler takes Fight Club to a whole new level dragging the narrator along with him, and he starts what he calls Project Mayhem. According to Tyler, Project Mayhem serves to “complete the right away destruction of civilization” (Palahniuk 125). And so Tyler drags the narrator along for his twisting and turning life but is there a deeper and darker element to the narrator and Tyler Durden’s  friendship? 

I loved this book. I loved the characters, the story, the deeper meaning of the book. I loved how it was both drastically unrealistic but also so realistic at the same time. The narrator and Tyler show what I would consider the two sides of a person. Or (since we’ve been discussing this in psychology) the narrator represents the superego and the beliefs of right and wrong with a strong side of guilt or pride, and Tyler represents the id and the desire for aggression and sex and pleasure and Marla represents the Ego and making connections with the world. There are so many pieces to this puzzle of a book and so many different ways to approach and dissect it, it was almost overwhelming the amount of meaning between the pages of this novel, and I ate it up. 

I would give this book a 10 out of 10. I really enjoyed it and found so much to be relatable to how the world is now, and even to my own life. I found myself relating to both Tyler and the narrator and even Marla. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes to read books which they can dissect psychologically, sociologically, philosophically, etc. I found it to be a book with such a deeper meaning than many of the books I have read recently, and a book I could spend a lot of time breaking down and pulling apart, and for that, I really enjoyed it.