Fight Club And Lullaby Analysis

Fight Club and Lullaby: Qualitative Differences in the Nature of Transgression"

It can be stated that a transgression is born from a person’s past, something that we humans are victims of. The past is unforgivable, inevitable and difficult to get away from and though we are the captains of our own ships, there are certain moments in our lives that we can’t escape. It is when the antecedent events press on our comfort zones that transgressions seem to manifest. This is the case with Chuck Palahnuik’s Fight Club and Lullaby where the past is the cause for murder, corruption, supernatural manifestations, Oedipal complexes and the destruction of normal ideologies. Murder is one of the major themes in Palahnuik’s transgressionary work and …show more content…
In Fight Club the persona of Tyler Durden is somewhat of a supernatural being. The narrator can see, speak and touch Durden all acts which make the reader/viewer believe that Tyler is, indeed a real person. In part, Durden is real or rather, an adaptation of something that the narrator believes is real. It is when the narrator’s insomnia had grown exponentially and support groups failed to help that Tyler is introduced. He appears when the narrator is relatively “alseep” and it is as Tyler that the narrator is able to fashion his anarchist army on capitalism in grandiose and evil ways. The narrator is a pawn, a body used to lead the “Space Monkey’s” to Project Mayhem’s fruition which, in the end sets him up for suicide. As Tyler tells the narrator who has finaled discovered his truth, “All the ways you wish you could be, that 's me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.” This is yet another way how a persons past can influence the transgressions of the present. All the ways which the narrator, in the past was weak, normal and boring, Tyler, in the present brings out strength albeit with disastrous consequences. In Lullaby, many of the characters have their bodies taken over by another. Helen’s body is taken over by Oyster whom forces her to drink liquid drain cleaner in order to prevent her and Streater from stopping his eco-terrorism scheme. Helen herself takes over the body of a police sergeant and though her transgression as Sarge are much less than Oyster, she uses the cop’s body in order to break Steater out of jail. This again is the past casting its shadow on the character 's transgressive behaviors. Oysters weakness in the past becomes power in the future when he finds the controlling spell which allows him to