Fight Club Chapter 3

"You're a projectionist and you're tired and angry, but mostly you're bored so you start by taking a single frame of pornography collected by some other projectionist that you find stashed away in the booth, and you splice this frame,...Tyler does this" (19-20 Ch.3). Tyler is the dominent male in the novel Fight Club. His sublimimal frames of pornography represents his superiority. A common theme throughtout the novel is the loss and gain of masculine identity. In Palahniuk's novel, the narrator and Tyler "discover a taste for late night, masochistic, bare-knuckled brawling" (Friday). The men in Fight Club along with the narrator and Tyler thrive on masochism, the getting of pleasure, often sexual, from being hurt or humiliated. Fight Club respresents everything that society will not let them be. The fights between the men compensate what society has taken from them. The emasculating effects on these white-collar, run of the mill kind of men results in their need for Fight Club, the consuming need to define their masculinity.