Fight Club Masculinity

In the movie Fight Club, an unnamed man stars as both the protagonist and the narrator. This man is discontent with his white-collar job, depressed, and plagued with insomnia. His only solace is to attend support groups for various afflictions and illnesses, none of which he possesses. In one of his various support groups, he meets a woman named Marla Singer, who is also a support group imposter or “tourist.” Her presence robs him of his comforting release and he is forced to search elsewhere for a new source of mitigation. On his way back from a business trip, the narrator meets a strange man named Tyler Durden and exchanges numbers with him. After arriving back at his home, he finds out that his apartment has been decimated by an explosion. …show more content…
We find him in a support group for testicular cancer, where men are sitting in a circle. They are expressing their feelings, crying and embracing each other in open arms. In effect, Palahniuk is showing that men have lost their way. Men are being castrated by society; a cancer is infecting their masculinity, slowly and painfully robbing it from them. The narrator tries to fill the void inside himself through the physical and emotional outpourings of pain from others. However, after Marla Singer is introduced, the narrator no longer feels special for attending these support groups and he has to find a new way to deal with his disenfranchisements. At this point in the movie, the narrator meets Tyler Durden. Despite their meeting, Tyler is actually a fabrication of the protagonists mind, a personified version of his id. The narrator begins to act and behave as Tyler does, slowly becoming his alter ego and listening to his inner instincts, in turn regaining his masculinity. In order to escape this ego/id polarity, the narrator shoots himself, symbolically ending his duality and being reborn. Just as the trigger is being pulled, the narrator says “My eyes are