Fight Club Study Guide

Jesse Kavadlo, a professor at Maryville University of St. Louis, argues that the Narrator's opposition to emasculation is a form of projection, and the problem that he fights is himself. He also argues that Palahniuk uses existentialism in the novel to conceal subtexts of feminism and romance, in order to convey these concepts in a novel that is mainly aimed at a male audience. In an essay titled“ Fight Club and the Disneyfication of Manhood,” Cameron White and Trenia Walker suggest that Project Mayhem’s ultimate goal, through the destruction of financial institutions, is to shatter what society deems “real” manhood, reducing manhood to survival instincts. Paul Skinner has also echoed this sentiment, stating, “the anger and dissatisfaction of the male characters is against one type of masculinity being suppressed by post-industrial consumerist society”. Palahniuk gives a simpler assertion about the theme of the novel, stating "all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people."

Paul Kennett argues that because the Narrator's fights with Tyler are fights with himself, and because he fights himself in front of his boss at the hotel, the Narrator is using the fights as a way of asserting himself as his own boss. These fights are a representation of the struggle of the proletarian at the hands of a higher capitalist power; by asserting himself as capable of having the same power he thus becomes his own master. Later when fight club is formed, the participants are all dressed and groomed similarly, allowing them to symbolically fight themselves at the club and gain the same power.

Tyler becomes nostalgic for patriarchal power giving him control and creates Project Mayhem to achieve this. Through this proto-fascist power structure, the Narrator seeks to learn "what, or rather, who, he might have been under a firm patriarchy." Through his position as leader of Project Mayhem, Tyler uses his power to become a "God/Father" to the "space monkeys" (the other members of Project Mayhem), although by the end of the novel his words hold more power than he does, as is evident in the space monkeys' threat to castrate the Narrator when he contradicts Tyler's rule. According to Kennett, this creates a paradox in that Tyler pushes the idea that men who wish to be free from a controlling father-figure are only self-actualized once they have children and become a father themselves, thus becoming controllers themselves in an endless cycle of patriarchal repression.

Johannes Hell argues that Palahniuk's use of the Narrator's somnambulism is a simple attempt at emphasizing the dangerous yet daring possibilities of life. Hell enforces the importance of the Narrator's sleepwalking and intense deprivation, for they have a firm influence on suffering readers," from a twisted perspective this is solace for everybody who suffers from somnambulism in a sense, that things could be worse, much worse in fact.

Project Mayhem’s terrorism in Fight Club has been analyzed within the context of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. In 2007, Ruth Quiney examined this link, stating that Fight Club ’s depiction of disaffected Western men joining a homegrown terrorist group anticipated some aspects of the War on Terror . Jesse Kavadlo, in his essay“With Us or Against Us: Chuck Palahniuk’s 9/11,” claims that Palahniuk was almost prophetic in predicting future acts of terror. He writes, “Palahniuk’s work demonstrates the disturbing intersections between the multiple meanings of the word “plot”: narrative, conspiratorial, and funereal, the word reminding us of the linguistic connections between our stories, our secrets, and our entombment.”