Fight Club

Fight Club{{ref|lowercase}} (1996) is the first published novel by Chuck Palahniuk. The plot is based around an unnamed protagonist who struggles with his growing discomfort with consumerism and changes in the state of masculinity in American culture. In an attempt to overcome this, he creates an underground boxing club as a new form of therapy. The novel was made into a movie of the same name in 1999 by director David Fincher, which resulted in the story becoming a pop culture phenomenon. A reissued version of the novel was published in 2004 that begins with an introduction by the author which talks about the conception and popularity of both the novel and the movie.

Subtext

Throughout the novel, Palahniuk uses the narrator and Tyler to comment on how people in modern society try to find meaning in their lives through commercial culture. Several lines in the novel make reference to this lifestyle as meaningless. Usually Palahniuk delivers this through overt methods, but there are also some allegorical references as well; for instance, the narrator, upon looking at the contents of his refrigerator, notices he has "a house full of condiments and no real food."{{ref|fc99p45}}

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Additionally, much of the novel comments on how many men in modern society have found dissatisfaction with the state of masculinity as it currently exists. The characters of the novel lament the fact that many of them were raised by their mothers due to their fathers either abandoning their family or divorcing their mothers. As a result, they see themselves as being "a generation of men raised by women", being without a male role model in their lives to help shape their masculinity. This ties in with the anti-consumer culture theme, as the men in the novel see their "IKEA nesting instinct" as resulting from the feminization of men in a matriarchal culture. Some readers and critics have noticed how the state of men in the novel is similar to the state of women in modern society, and that Palahniuk may have also been writing about the problems of female life.{{ref|avni}}

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~