Masculinity In Tyler Durden's Fight Club

Included in this crisis of masculinity is the narrator of Fight Club and his alter ego Tyler Durden; or in Freud’s theory a melancholic sadomasochist (Ta, 2006, p. 266). The narrator ‘meets’ Tyler on a plane in chapter 3, just before the narrator’s apartment is mysteriously blown-up (p.25). Throughout the novel, it is clear to see that Tyler becomes the narrator’s catalyst for breaking out of consumerist masculinity: ‘Tyler is…the male within the feminized character… He is the manifestation of idealized masculinity’ (Boon, 2003); this is inferred by Tyler’s actions such as splicing images of a ‘lunging red penis or a yawning wet vagina’ into feature movies, thus literally injecting masculinity into a consumerist product (p.29-30). In fact,