Mental Breakdown In Fight Club

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, the reader is taken through the slow mental breakdown of the main character of the novel. This nameless narrator goes through several mental changes that can be reflected in the environment that he surrounds himself in. Also, Marla Singer is portrayed as the only tangible thing that connects him to the real world and acts as a mirror reflecting his lies. As the novel progresses, the narrator starts to sleep earlier and earlier thus giving the opposite personality of the narrator, Tyler Durden, more and more time to take over operations and cause more and more damage to the nameless narrator. Tyler gives the narrator the freedom to do the things he could not do in the current position he was in. Tyler represents …show more content…
Once he has created Tyler he uses him as the reason for going through a cleansing purge by blowing up his apartment. He abandons these items because it is causing a form of self-slavery to free himself from his routine lifestyle (de Rocha). “Once you lose everything then you truly free to do anything,” Fight Club (Palahniuk). The book’s narrator makes a comment about how his pornography magazines had switched to home catalogs and deciding what home décor defined him as a person (Palahniuk). This shows that the narrator was slowly letting the things he owned define him as a person, and the “meeting” of Tyler was his unconscious way of giving him an escape from all of the materialistic things he had come to love. The narrator decides to live with Tyler after he demolishes the inside of his apartment. The house on Paper Street is described as dirty, rundown, and overall nothing like the clean-cut apartment he once lived in. However, the narrator is more tranquil and happy in this house rather than his prim little apartment. This gives the novel a Yin-Yang quality …show more content…
In Tyler’s opinion in takes a physical and emotional beating to achieve this overall acceptance that one day you will die (Palahniuk). Self-destruction is self-enlightenment and the only way to enlighten the world was to destroy all in it. This is awoken when the insomnia becomes a problem that the narrator brings up to his doctor, he tells him he is in pain, and the doctor tells him that if he really wants to see pain to go to a support group. The support group was the first step to the mental decline. He used other people’s pain and suffering to help him sleep at night because they assumed that he was there because he was dying as well. This gave him more sympathy than the doctor or anyone else in his life had given him at this point. However, the appearance of Marla, whose role will be discussed later, reflected the lie that he was not actually sick. This caused him to not be able to go to a support group every night thus causing him to lose sleep, and this chain of events led him to create is split personality of Tyler. Because of this he needed a new way to cope with the fact that he felt dead inside without sleep. The narrator was simply using these things to help him feel alive, almost like a religion (Mathews). Like some people going to church to make them feel better about themselves, the narrator needed something to make him feel good enough to