The book fight club - Research Paper Example

The story is told by the Narrator, a man who does not ever give out his name. Instead, he creates a separate identity calling himself Tyler Durden so that he can have a means of escape from the society and its conformities. The men believe that they have no aspects of masculinity seeing the way they are dependent on the commodities that the world has to offer to make their lives much easier, how they do not have to actually work for anything and yet everything gets done. To be thought of as important by the others, they just need to have the right product by the right company.

They have nothing concrete to do, no battles to fight and win, the only purpose is to seek out the meaning of their life and why they feel a constant sense of doubtfulness about their masculinity. Right in the beginning, we are introduced to the “Remaining Men Together” that is a support group for men who have testicular cancer and so have been emasculated. This is a not so subtle way of representing masculinity dying in the society. Having certain important parts of their bodies missing leads to them feeling less of themselves and having troubled – if any – love lives, which results in a further beating of their emotions.

One of the men shares his story about how his ex-wife finally has a child with her new husband since she could obviously not conceive with her first husband. To most men, the ability to play their part in creating a child is what makes them worthy of their sex even if they do nothing to help bring them up in the future. However, if anyone is sterile, they are assumed as being weak and having no manhood. This is just one of the mindsets that the society has settled down in our minds. The men realize how easy their lives are and they hate it.

They are determined to strip off every outside influence that has made a mark on their bodies and minds and become their own man. They no longer want to be led by the society and its rules or its “obsessive concern with profits, consumption, and the commercial values that underlie its market-driven ethos” (Giroux). They show their inner masculine qualities by deciding to open the Fight Club. Ironically, fulfilling the stereotypes about the males regarding how man’s answer to everything was violence, they decide to fight it out.

The rationalization given being that the pain and the adrenaline they felt helped them keep themselves on their toes. The wrestling meant that they were fighting for something solid; they had to work over something. They had to hurt the other person if they wanted to gain the least amount of injuries, they had a goal in mind now and that made them feel important. As the Narrator says “You weren't alive anywhere like you were alive here … who you were in fight club is not who you were in the rest of the world” (Palahniuk).

Winning a fight showed that they were men with great physical talents, that they were stronger than most. There were no battlefields to fight in, no wars to win. Soldiers were not required but the men were all trained enough to be able to respond in a similar situation if the need ever arose. It is through the pain that they put themselves through that they discover their selves. They are “set free to construe (their) own fears, to baptize them with privately chosen names and to cope with them on (their)