"Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die."
A self-destructive, nihilistic insomniac (who also happens to be obsessed with death) becomes addicted to bizarre support groups. Then his life takes a new direction after he meets the manic-depressive Marla Singer and the anarchistic Tyler Durden, his alter-ego. Soon these guys are setting up underground fight clubs all over the country - a movement that soon degenerates into Project Mayhem, an all-out attack on EVERYTHING held sacred by society.
"Before there was the movie..." In the latest paperback edition of Fight Club, the author includes a humorous introduction about how the book and movie have totally permeated our culture. I know exactly what he means. For instance, I participated in a lame pub trivia contest a couple of weeks ago and the deadbeat host had the nerve to recite the trivia rules in the form of Fight Club rules ("First rule of trivia, you have to have fun playing trivia!"). Even all the trivia geeks and dorks groaned in unison. I thought (and hoped!) we were going to take this guy out into the parking lot and beat the living shit out of him! It was like, hey, fight club rules are sacred, don't trivialize them, you dumb fuck! A dark comedy, a sustained diatribe against mindless consumerism, a Swiftian satire, an anthem to aimless violence and self-destruction, an existential metaphor, a nihilistic nightmare - Fight Club can be read as all of those things or none of them. "If our lives are going to continue being unfulfilled and boring, perhaps we do need some sort of short-term violent chaos incorporated into them to make them more palatable," said Palahniuk, in a 1998 interview. Fight Club is a blueprint, an education in rebellion, a BIBLE for everyone out there who doesn't give a fuck...
"It was just an experiment to kill a slow afternoon at work. Instead of walking a character from scene to scene in a story, there had to be some way to just—cut, cut, cut. To jump. From scene to scene. Without losing the reader. To show every aspect of a story, but only the kernel of each aspect. The core moment. Then another core moment. Then, another. There had to be some kind of chorus. Something bland that wouldn't hold the reader's attention, but would act to signal a jump to a new angle or aspect of the story. A bland kind of buffer that would be the touchstone or landmark a reader would need to not feel lost. A kind of neutral sorbet, like something served between courses in a fancy dinner. A signal, like buffer music in radio broadcasts, to announce the next topic. The next jump. A kind of glue or mortar that would hold together a mosaic of different moments and details. Giving them all a continuity and yet showcasing each moment by not ramming it up against the next moment. Think of the movie Citizen Kane, and how the faceless, nameless newsreel reporters create the framework for telling the story from a lot of different sources. That's what I wanted to do. That one, boring afternoon at work. So for that chorus—that 'transitional device'—I wrote eight rules. The whole idea of a fight club wasn't important. It was arbitrary. But the eight rules had to apply to something so why not a club where you could ask someone to fight? The way you'd ask for a dance at a disco. Or challenge someone to a game of pool or darts. The fighting wasn't the important part of the story. What I needed were the rules . . ." —Chuck Palahniuk, introduction to Fight Club, 1997
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