Fight Club: Consumerism and the Oedipal Complex
Fight Club: Consumerism and the Oedipal Complex
With a gun in your mouth it’s hard to narrate. The Narrator feels the cold metallic taste 190 stories up in the air on the roof of the Parker-Morris Building. Primary and secondary charges wrap around the base columns and in a few minutes all 190 stories will go into free-fall crushing the National Museum below. Welcome to Project Mayhem. If you destroy our history we can be the architects of the future. The Narrator attempts to raise his voice in opposition but Tyler pushes the barrel down firmly, restricting his tongue. Then he recalls how it all started, how it all had to do with an addiction support groups and another faker named Marla Singer… Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a contemporary example of Freudian influence on literature. Several Freudian themes are explored throughout the story including the castration complex, the phallic stage, the oedipal triangle, and the relationship between the id, the ego, and the super-ego. In this novel Palahniuk attempts to reconcile the primitive nature of masculinity with the modern notions of responsibility and reality attached to it as well as to comment on the contemporary version of the oedipal complex found in single-parent households. He does so through this fictional novel with a style that incorporates a very fragmented sentence structure which allows him to give us very cerebral stream of thoughts much like the voice in your own head. The Narrator attempts to find equilibrium between the two extremes and to simultaneously resolve his oedipal complex. This represents the contemporary plight men face today where violence and sex are taboo and a source of shame while consumerism and economic domination are exalted. This internal struggle is personified and explored through the Narrator and Tyler.
The fractured portion of the Narrator’s psyche manifests in Tyler. Yet, they are two opposing entities throughout the novel, even sabotaging one another much in the
With a gun in your mouth it’s hard to narrate. The Narrator feels the cold metallic taste 190 stories up in the air on the roof of the Parker-Morris Building. Primary and secondary charges wrap around the base columns and in a few minutes all 190 stories will go into free-fall crushing the National Museum below. Welcome to Project Mayhem. If you destroy our history we can be the architects of the future. The Narrator attempts to raise his voice in opposition but Tyler pushes the barrel down firmly, restricting his tongue. Then he recalls how it all started, how it all had to do with an addiction support groups and another faker named Marla Singer… Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a contemporary example of Freudian influence on literature. Several Freudian themes are explored throughout the story including the castration complex, the phallic stage, the oedipal triangle, and the relationship between the id, the ego, and the super-ego. In this novel Palahniuk attempts to reconcile the primitive nature of masculinity with the modern notions of responsibility and reality attached to it as well as to comment on the contemporary version of the oedipal complex found in single-parent households. He does so through this fictional novel with a style that incorporates a very fragmented sentence structure which allows him to give us very cerebral stream of thoughts much like the voice in your own head. The Narrator attempts to find equilibrium between the two extremes and to simultaneously resolve his oedipal complex. This represents the contemporary plight men face today where violence and sex are taboo and a source of shame while consumerism and economic domination are exalted. This internal struggle is personified and explored through the Narrator and Tyler.
The fractured portion of the Narrator’s psyche manifests in Tyler. Yet, they are two opposing entities throughout the novel, even sabotaging one another much in the
Cited: 1) Grayson, Erik M, ed. "Stirrings Still." The International Journal of Existential Literature 2.2 (2005): . Web. 1 Apr. 2012. 2) Freud, Sigmund, and Peter Gay. The Freud Reader. New York: W.W. Norton, 1989. Print. 3) Palahniuk, Chuck. Fight Club. New York: W.W. Norton, 2005. 4) Ta, L. M. (2006), Hurt So Good: Fight Club, Masculine Violence, and the Crisis of Capitalism. The Journal of American Culture, 29: 265–277. doi: 10.1111/j.1542-734X.2006.00370.x