Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club

Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk, tells the story of a nameless narrator who struggles with a double personality disorder. Throughout Palahniuk’s novel, the narrator slowly evolves to become more like his “best friend”, which eventually leads the protagonist to live a life of chaos and dissatisfaction. In literature, there are characters that are either known for being reliable or unreliable. One can figure out if a character is reliable or unreliable by reading the text. In addition, reliability can be based on if the character has anything to do with memory loss, uses drugs or alcohol, or is removed from the action. If the character is compromised by one of the above, then the character is unreliable. An unreliable character cannot tell the …show more content…
All three points discussed above create a triangle that results in the chaos that Palahniuk describes throughout Fight Club. If an individual is extremely exhausted from their job that leads to chaos because when they are so tired they do not want to work at that job any longer. Insomnia and exhaustion then leads to a person having their friend watch every move that they make because they realize that they do irresponsible things at night when they are awake. The last piece of the triangle is how a disorder can cause complete chaos. The personality disorder shown throughout the novel was one of the main reasons that defined the theme of chaos. If a person does not realize that they are seeing an imaginary person, then they are in trouble; especially if they come head to head with an imaginary friend like Tyler Durden. Like the narrator, this disorder can bring one to a mental breakdown and eventually take them to a mental institution. Palahniuk’s over all messages throughout the novel is to tell readers that when life gets exhausting or boring, spice it up a little bit. But be careful to not over do