"FIght Club" by Chuck Palahnuik Review 1

Cover art for "Fight Club" by Chuck Palahniuk

Book Response 1: #21(LA) Does this book raise questions about society as a whole or of a particular culture? What view of the world and/or human beings does the author seem to be expressing?


This is a perfect response question to this book because of how many great questions about society and human beings it brings up. You could look at the entire book as a critiquing of the human race, but I don't think thats exactly what the author was intending. Either way he definitely raised a great number of questions and brought the current conditions of our society into an entirely different light for me.


 The book starts out with a nameless main character (or having many fictitious names at support groups) who is your complete average fucking Joe. Beyond hopeless schmuck. He his locked in an utterly pitiful existence of working a job he hates that completely drains him physically and emotionally, living in a lovely spacious condo filled wall to wall with furnishings that are lavish and pointless in the sense of survival while he allows these possessions to define him to a T. Through his eyes his life is pointless.


But through the thing that defines him most, his severe insomnia, he turns his life around. Through this he creates an alter ego (subconsciously) that can be everything he can't, and do the things he cannot persuade himself to do. He starts an entire underground movement of "fight clubs" that inspire and desensitize people while giving them a sense of liberation that cannot be attained through all their normal, boring existences. This starts an entire revolution of people digging and cutting their way through the status quo of society as a whole to give them all a sense of true living. 


The thing that brought the biggest question to me was a passage that talks about living in a world that is entirely ungoverned by any political body and humans existing as hunters/gatherers. Aspects of this passage include wearing one pair of leather clothes that will last you your entire life, climbing vines wrapped around the Sears Tower, and laying strips of venison to dry on a super-highway. This perspective of living in a modern world without modern amenities is fascinating and inspiring, whether or not you believe that is how we should live. It makes you think about what you really need and how much you don't that you possess in today's world, and how angry you should be at social constructs that cause this addictive, pointless, excessive existence. 


This book left me feeling like all the things this one man did were good, even though he directly and indirectly caused so many terrible acts of terrorism and violence, which gives me the biggest question: Could this be a good thing for society? For the human race?