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. The narrator’s alter ego, Tyler, is how masculinity is defined in the late-twentieth- century American culture. He represents the anti-hero. He is charismatic and mischievous. The wounding and the masochism are the characteristics of masculine identity in today’s society. Men feel the need to prove themselves to be “real men”. That feeling is relevant to how society has emasculated men. Palahniuk’s real life experiences were reflected in his novels. He would have a bruised and bloody face given to him by his co-workers and no one really responded. He once was quoted, “you could really do anything you wanted in your personal life, as long as you looked so bad that people would not want to know the details. I started thinking of a fight club as a really structured, controlled way of just going nuts in a really safe situation.” He believed in expressing one’s violence impulses in less dangerous ways like the narrator.