Fight Club Chapter 19: Difference between revisions

This chapter starts where chapter 18 left off in the car crash with the mechanic, Tyler Durden and three other space monkeys are in the back seat.  The car has crashed and is off of the road. The space monkeys are in the back seat quiet, and the narrator wonders if they are passed out or asleep. The mechanic tells the narrator “You had a near–life experience. The mechanic explains to the narrator how the back bumper is hanging off of the car after he ran head on with another car. The narrator asks the mechanic if the car crash is a homework assignment. The mechanic explains that part of it is a homework assignment and that he had to make four human sacrifices and has to pick up a load of fat for the soap. The narrator ask the mechanic what Tyler is planning, and his answer sounds exactly the way Tyler would have said it if he was asked the question. “I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived…and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables”(141).The mechanic goes on saying young men and women are living in a world where they are chasing a false sense of reality by buying clothes and cars that they don’t need. He says that people work jobs that they hate just so they can buy what they don’t really need. “We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression” (141). The mechanic says that the only way to show people freedom is by enslaving them, and the way to show them courage is to frighten them. “The irony is that Fight Club, and later project Mayhem, reproduce the same effects of capitalism by creating the illusion of freedom through demands for self-regulation and self punishment” (Ta). The mechanic tells the narrator that they are headed to the medical waste incinerator to pick up the fat. == Notes ==