Fight Club

Image credit: Dymocks

“The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.” It’s a line that has intrigued, mystified, and spooked readers and filmgoers alike for over a decade. Perhaps one of the most celebrated anarchist stories in circulation, Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a literary classic for a reason and its translation into film has only strengthened the macabre injustices of society and the tragic ironies of the world that the book illustrates –and it’s only getting better with age!

Fight Club tells the story of a nameless insomniac protagonist that one day meets the charismatic Tyler Durden: a Devil-may-care anarchist sticking it to the rich one measly service shift at a time. Between peeing in bouillabaisse and splicing pornographic images into Disney films Tyler and our nice protagonist create fight club: a gathering of good men with white-collar jobs that comes together to beat the crap out of each other. As the club gains popularity black eyes and broken jaws are not the worst injuries to occur as Tyler soon puts his leadership and DIY chemistry skills to use and creates an army of anarchists on a mission to cleanse society. With the world on the verge of mayhem our insomniac protagonist must find out once and for all who is Tyler Durden?

This anarchist thriller of a novel proves to still arouse those inner feelings of morose waste and neglect of an overshadowed social class that have sitting inside all of us for years. You know the feeling: the idea that the world is indeed poisoned and so far gone into deterioration that the only thing that could bring it back is a few thousand volts. Palahnuik’s taut prose and tight sentence structure really highlights those feelings of disinterested loathing, creating a protagonist and a narrator’s voice that feels like he’s almost questioning the point of telling us this story.

Image credit: Yasmina Moya, The Cult

The book’s quick flashes between past and present is what keeps you turning pages, creating this almost urgent pace that counteracts with the narrator’s deliberately flat storytelling. And then of course there’s this fabulous twist that is semi-reminiscent of such unreliable narrators as those in The Tell-Tale Heart or The Turn of the Screw yet is simultaneously completely modern and fresh, bringing a classic trope of Gothic literature into a new era and almost turning it on its ear.

While it’s definitely not a book you can just pick up and read lightly –it definitely does take some mental preparation- Fight Club is a standout classic in modern literature as it provides scathing commentary on the state of the world, reintroduces classic narrative tropes with a twist, and poses a challenge for its readers.

Fight Club was written by Chuck Palahnuik and published 1996 and published in 1997 by W. W. Norton & Company Inc. New York.