Fight Club example essay topic

Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club, that perhaps gained more exposure through the film adaptation, is narrated by a character whose name is never revealed but who is often referred to in critiques and reviews as Joe, a reference to the character's discovery of an old Reader's Digest article in which the bodily organs and functions of various people refer to themselves in the first person. The name 'Joe' is used in this context throughout the novel to comically articulate the character's mood or mentality, for example on page 59, he says I am Joe's Raging Bile Duct. Joe discovers a cure for his insomnia in various support groups for diseases that he does not have, taking solace in the pain and open suffering of others until he encounters Marla, another 'tourist' as he describes her, who disrupts his self prescribed 'therapy'. After his apartment mysteriously explodes while away on business, Joe moves into a dilapidated house with what is later revealed as an alter ego in the form of the character Tyler Durden.

The pair set about creating an anarchistic 'club' where the primary physical objective is to fight, for reasons that will be textually observed in relation to this notion of identity. Tyler and Joe eventually develop what is essentially a small organisation, which is often narrated in almost militaristic descriptions, where a group of followers receive instructions and engage in seemingly anarchistic activities that are orchestrated by Tyler, motivated by issues of socio-economic class and activism relating specifically to the demographic of men involved. Fight Club broadly observes a generation of men made redundant by technology and progressive society, both in the literal arena of work and in a figurative sense of perceptions of masculinity. The character of Joe is a recall campaign coordinator for an undisclosed motor vehicle company, a fairly unassuming occupation that sees him spend the majority of his time either in the office in a suit and tie, or travelling to various accident sites to calculate whether or not a product recall of faulty vehicles is cost effective when compared to the expense of court settlements with victims and their families. The men who come to comprise Fight Club's membership are mostly employees of the service industry, a demographic once defined by physical labour before being replaced by the machines of mass production.

In her article Masculine Identity in the Service Class: An Analysis of Fight Club, Adrienne Redd articulates this notion of masculine identity. Fight Club is also about masculinity, but with the crucial proviso that it is about masculinity among a specific class of American men: the burgeoning stratum of service or grey-collar workers. There was a time when blue-collar workers could invest in a kind of honour and mythology of hard physical work, but 'the world has changed' (as one Bruce Springsteen song laments) and now former steelworkers are parking cars, waiting tables, and watching security monitors. They have not even the solace of big muscles and the solidarity of unions from which to construct their identities and with which to salve their bruised egos. And as a character says in the film, they lack a great cause, like a war or depression, in which to test themselves.

(Redd, web 2004).