Fight Club Identity

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When we hear the phrase fight club we often take this term literally as we imagine two individuals fighting in some sort of ring. However in this novel the main fight that is presented is mental as the narrator is trying to figure out his identity. Fight Club is a novel that was written by Chuck Palahniuk about a man who does not enjoy the life he is living. In this novel this individual struggles with insomnia, and went to support groups to cope with it. He meets Tyler Durden and Marla singer along the way who play major roles in the narrator’s self-discovery. He started a fight club to cope with his life stresses with Tyler which later became a propaganda project known as project mayhem and started to illicit chaos among the city. Towards…show more content…
The narrator is first introduced in the novel as a man who was not very confident in himself and who was constantly loathing in self-doubt. He lives a boring life that consists of him working a full time white collar job at an automobile company that he does not like very much. The narrator lives a life some would call safe because he tends to live a life that is responsible, rigid, passive, and somewhat tied down. However, Tyler was the opposite of the narrator and he was everything the narrator was not, the narrator even said “I love everything about Tyler Durden…..Tyler was capable and free, and I am not” (Palahniuk, 1996, p.80). Tyler unlike the narrator seems to move through life confidently without any regret or self-doubt. Tyler was someone who the narrator idolized because the narrator wanted to be him and live the non-restricting life that Tyler had. Since the introduction of Tyler to the narrator, the narrator’s personality changed to one that resembles Tyler’s personality. At the beginning of the fight club, Tyler was the one leading the men with the narrator falling back in the shadows and only providing a helping hand .As fight club progressed the narrator started to take more of leadership role as he became the one that was sending out the orders. As the novel evolves, the more the identity of Tyler consumes the narrator. This lead to the…show more content…
The self-discovery that he is Tyler assisted the narrator in overcoming his insomnia by finding the root cause of why he has been staying up. Marla Singer although first started out as someone the narrator detested with the involvement of Tyler the narrator actually learned that he was in fact in love with Marla. Confidence has not really been the narrators strong suit but has been Tyler’s as the novel progressed, the narrators confidence has evolved also as he became Tyler Durden. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, Dissociative Identity Disorder is stated as a disorder in which there are two or more distinct identities each of which becomes dominant and controls behavior from time to time to the exclusion of the other. Although not everyone has this disorder we all have different sides of our personalities that only some people would see or know about. A good example of this is the way individuals act with their friends as opposed to their family members or to their boss. These different identities or personalities are created in order to cater to the different people or situations we are in and this is something we all do whether it was intended or not. Sometimes these other personalities can be referred as alter egos which is described as an individual’s
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