Fight Club/the Secret Sharer

In both Fight Club and The Secret Sharer, the protagonists (an unnamed narrator and an unnamed captain) both have low self-esteem, and low self-worth. They both experience feelings of loneliness and isolation, as if they are cut off from the rest of the world. To overcome these low self-perceptions, they subconsciously create a manifestation, a second self. Their ‘other self’ is the opposite of themselves; confident, headstrong and powerful. However, while we know that Tyler (Fight Club) is not real, we are not sure about Leggatt (The Secret Sharer) as there is evidence to suggest that he is real, but also evidence suggesting that he is not.

One of the big questions throughout reading both novels is, is the second self real or not? Whereas we work out that Tyler is a manifestation of the narrator’s mind, with Leggatt it is harder to distinguish. Sometimes the novella suggests he is real. For example, we assume that he is real when the Captain of the ship, Sephora, comes aboard the Captains ship. He tells the tale of how Leggatt killed a man and then fled the ship. We know that the Sephora’s Captain is real and is actually aboard the ship because the crew aboard the ship also see him and hear the tale. However, the novella also suggests he is not real. Nobody else sees him. The only person to physically see Leggatt is the Captain; ‘Can it be, I asked myself, that he is not visible to other eyes than mine?’ The Captain hides Leggatt away on the ship so that nobody else sees him. However it would have only been a matter of time before someone found him aboard the ship, which suggests he cannot be real. At the end of the novella, we are still left guessing at whether Leggatt is real or not. In Fight Club the status of the double is much clearer, we are informed, by the narrator, that Tyler Durden is not real, he is only a manifestation of the narrators mind. Before we find out this, however, there is evidence that leads us to believe he is real. At Fight Club, for