INTRODUCTION
Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 cult novel Fight Club and it’s subsequent film adaptation, directed by David Fincher, are a prime example of internalism’s importance in adaptation, to the extent that the protagonist is known widely as the Narrator in the absence of any other name being given.
The narration in the film is massively important as the majority of the plot, as we find out near the end, has actually taken place inside the Narrator’s own head, and so the view the audience gets into the Narrator’s inner world is essential. For this reason, it is obvious why Fincher retains much of the narration which appears in the novel in the form of a voiceover from Edward Norton’s character.
This leads to an overall more faithful adaptation, …show more content…
“What happened in fight club didn’t happen in words”
However, this is not always the case. The film also develops “the characters and the plot by applying a number of stylistic cinematic choices that allow the mise-en-scene and the camera to become significant factors in the creation of meaning”. The Narrator’s interior monologue as it appears in the novel is sometimes adapted not into voiceover but into action, as in the Ikea sequence. The novel states “The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their Ikea furniture catalogue”. In the film this translates to the shot of the Narrator sitting on the toilet with the Ikea catalogue in his hands, and the greater implication of this image in terms of theme is further explored in the following sequence in which the apartment is represented as a scene from an Ikea catalogue. According to Nicholas
Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 cult novel Fight Club and it’s subsequent film adaptation, directed by David Fincher, are a prime example of internalism’s importance in adaptation, to the extent that the protagonist is known widely as the Narrator in the absence of any other name being given.
The narration in the film is massively important as the majority of the plot, as we find out near the end, has actually taken place inside the Narrator’s own head, and so the view the audience gets into the Narrator’s inner world is essential. For this reason, it is obvious why Fincher retains much of the narration which appears in the novel in the form of a voiceover from Edward Norton’s character.
This leads to an overall more faithful adaptation, …show more content…
“What happened in fight club didn’t happen in words”
However, this is not always the case. The film also develops “the characters and the plot by applying a number of stylistic cinematic choices that allow the mise-en-scene and the camera to become significant factors in the creation of meaning”. The Narrator’s interior monologue as it appears in the novel is sometimes adapted not into voiceover but into action, as in the Ikea sequence. The novel states “The people I know who used to sit in the bathroom with pornography, now they sit in the bathroom with their Ikea furniture catalogue”. In the film this translates to the shot of the Narrator sitting on the toilet with the Ikea catalogue in his hands, and the greater implication of this image in terms of theme is further explored in the following sequence in which the apartment is represented as a scene from an Ikea catalogue. According to Nicholas