Comparing The Narrator And Tyler Durden In Fight Club
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“This is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time” (Palahniuk 61).
Life can be deceptive. I know this because Tyler knows this. In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, Tyler Durden, the narrator’s shadow self, represents all of the attributes that are missing in the narrator’s life. The narrator lives in an apartment, works in an office building, and has an overall bland lifestyle. Tyler lives in an abandoned house, has an exciting personality, goes out, is a ladies’ man, and has a night job as a waiter in which he pees in the guests’ soup, “[sticks] it in all their orange mousses”, and another job in a movie theatre in which he splices inappropriate pictures into films. Tyler Durden presents a danger to modern society. He tells people what they don’t want to hear, rallies people behind him, and relishes every day like it is his last.…show more content… Tyler is a projection of all of the things that are repressed in the narrator’s psyche. Although his secure lifestyle gives him superficial happiness, living conservatively eats him up from the inside to channel deep desires to let his emotions fly. He needs to let go of his inside frustrations and consequently Tyler blows up buildings, bashes cars, kills people, and rallies up an army to share his frustrations. By living a bland lifestyle, we lose sight of the things that are important to us and we get distracted by possessions like the narrator’s IKEA furniture which “took [his] whole life to buy.” The narrator’s happiness relies on items like these but Tyler knows this is false and blows up his apartment. Living a lifestyle like Tyler can be frightening and filled with ambiguity; nevertheless we aren’t “alive anywhere” like we are when doing