In 1999, director David Fincher adapted the novel into a film of the same name. The movie became a pop culture phenomenon, yet, in the wake of the movie's popularity, the novel—the first published by the writer—was criticized for its content, particularly for explicitly depicting violence.
Chuck Palahniuk first tried publishing a novel — Invisible Monsters — but publishers rejected it as too disturbing, so he concentrated on writing Fight Club. Initially it was published as a short story (chapter 6 in the novel) in the compilation Pursuit of Happiness, but he then expanded it to novel length.
The novel was re-issued in 1999 and 2004, the latter re-issue has an author's introduction, about the conception and popularity of novel and movie.
The original, hardcover edition of Fight Club was well reviewed and won some literary awards, yet its commercial shelf life was short; nevertheless, it went to Hollywood, generating cinematic-adaptation interest, and, in 1999, screenwriter Jim Uhls and director David Fincher did so. The film failed, but nevertheless a cult following emerged with the DVD edition and as a result an original, hardcover edition of the novel is now a collector's item.
The club is based on fist fights that Palahniuk fought, once while camping. In interviews, the writer has said he does not know, yet still is approached by aficionados wanting to know — Where is the local fight club? — insisting there is no such real organization, like in the novel, however, he has heard of real, existing fight clubs, some said existing before the novel. The novel's current introduction refers to actual, fight-club-style mischief, by a "waiter from one of London's two finest restaurants" who said he ejaculated into Margaret Thatcher's food. Like-wise the support groups; as a volunteer, he took terminally ill people to them. Moreover, Project Mayhem is lightly based on the Cacophony Society, of which he is a member, and other events derive from stories told to him.
Beyond his public and private lives, Fight Club's cultural impact is evidenced in U.S. teenagers and techies establishing fight clubs. Pranks, such as food-tampering, have been repeated by fans of the book, documented in his essay "Monkey Think, Monkey Do", in the book Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories and in the introduction to the 2004 re-issue of Fight Club. Other fans have been inspired to pro-social activity, telling him it inspired them to return to college.
Besides Fight Club few of the writer's other writings have been adapted. In 2004 Fight Club was to be transformed into musical theater, developed by Palahniuk, Fincher, and Trent Reznor.
The novel tells the story of an anonymous protagonist who hates his job and his lifestyle; he works as a Product Recall Specialist for an anonymous car company, responsible for organizing product recalls of defective models only if the corresponding cost-benefit analysis indicates that the recall-cost is less than the cost of out-of-court settlements paid to the relatives of the killed (paralleling the Ford Pinto's safety problems and recall). Simultaneously, he is becoming disenchanted with the "nesting instinct" of the consumerism that has absorbed his life — forcing the definition of his identity via the furniture, clothes, and things that he owns. These dissatisfactions, combined with his frequent business trips through several time zones, are mentally taxing enough that he develops severe insomnia.
At his doctor's recommendation (who thinks insomnia is not a serious ailment), the narrator attends a support group for men suffering testicular cancer, to "see what real suffering is like". On learning that crying and listening to the emotional problems of suffering people is an emotional release, he is able to sleep again but becomes dependent on attending these meetings. Although not sick like the others, he is never caught being a "tourist", until meeting Marla Singer, a woman who attends support groups like he. She reflects the narrator's "tourism", reminding him that he doesn't belong there. He begins hating Marla for keeping him from crying, and, therefore, from sleeping. After a confrontation, they agree to attend separate support group meetings to avoid each other.
Shortly before this incident, his life radically changes on meeting Tyler Durden, a charismatic psychopath working low-pay jobs at night in order to perform deviant behaviour on the job. After his confrontation with Marla, an explosion destroys the narrator's condominium apartment; he asks Tyler if he can stay at his house. Tyler agrees, but asks for something in return: "I want you to hit me as hard as you can". Their fist fight, in a saloon's parking lot, attracts local, socially disenchanted men; "Fight Club", a new form of psychological support group is born, mental therapy via bare-knuckle fighting, set to rules:
Later in the book, the mechanic tells the narrator two new rules of the fight club. The first new rule is that nobody is the center of the fight club except for the two men fighting. The second new rule is that the fight club will always be free.
Meanwhile, Tyler rescues Marla from a suicide attempt, and the two initiate an affair that confounds the narrator. Throughout this affair, Marla is mostly unaware of the existence of fight club and completely unaware of Tyler and the narrator's interaction with one another.
As the fight club's membership grows (and, unbeknownst to the narrator, spreads to other cities across the country), Tyler begins to use it to spread anti-consumerist ideas and recruits its members to participate in increasingly elaborate attacks on corporate America. This was originally the narrator's idea, but Tyler takes control from him. Tyler eventually gathers the most devoted fight club members (referred to as "space monkeys") and forms "Project Mayhem," a cult-like organization that trains itself as an army to bring down modern civilization. This organization, like the fight club, is controlled by a set of rules:
The narrator starts off as a loyal participant in Project Mayhem, seeing it as the next step for the fight club. However, he becomes uncomfortable with the increasing destructiveness of their activities after it results in the death of Bob.
As the narrator endeavors to stop Tyler and his followers, he learns that he is Tyler; Tyler is not a separate person, but a separate personality. As the narrator struggled with his hatred for his job and his consumerist lifestyle, his mind began to form a new personality that was able to escape from the problems of his normal life. The final straw came when he met Marla; Tyler was truly born as a distinct personality when the narrator's unconscious desire for Marla clashed with his conscious hatred for her. Having come to the surface, Tyler's personality has been slowly taking over the narrator's mind, which he planned to take over completely by making the narrator's real personality more like his. The narrator's bouts of insomnia had actually been Tyler's personality surfacing; Tyler would be active whenever the narrator was "sleeping." This allowed Tyler to manipulate the narrator into helping him create the fight club; Tyler learned recipes for creating explosives when he was in control and used this knowledge to blow up his own condo.
The narrator also learns that Tyler plans to blow up the Parker-Morris building (the fictional "tallest building in the world") in the downtown area of the city using homemade bombs created by Project Mayhem. The actual reason for the explosion is to destroy the nearby national museum. During the explosion, Tyler plans to die as a martyr for Project Mayhem, taking the narrator's life as well. Realizing this, the narrator sets out to stop Tyler, although Tyler is always thinking ahead of him. In his attempts to stop Tyler, he makes peace with Marla (who has always known the narrator as Tyler) and explains to her that he is not Tyler Durden. The narrator is eventually forced to confront Tyler on the roof of the building. The narrator is held captive at gunpoint by Tyler, forced to watch the destruction wrought on the museum by Project Mayhem. Marla comes to the roof with one of the support groups. Tyler vanishes, as “Tyler was his hallucination, not hers.”
With Tyler gone, the narrator waits for the bomb to explode and kill him. However, the bomb malfunctions because Tyler mixed paraffin into the explosives, which the narrator says early in the book "has never, ever worked for me." Still alive and holding the gun that Tyler used to carry on him, the narrator decides to make the first decision that is truly his own: he puts the gun in his mouth and shoots himself. Some time later, he awakens in a hospital, believing that he is dead and has gone to heaven. The book ends with members of Project Mayhem who work at the institution telling the narrator that their plans still continue, and that they are expecting Tyler to come back.
Kennett further argues that Tyler wants to use this chaos to change history so that "God’s middle children" will have some historical significance, whether or not this significance is "damnation or redemption". This will figuratively return their absent fathers, as judgment by future generations will replace judgment by their fathers.
After reading stories written from the perspective of the organs of a man named Joe, the narrator begins using similar quotations to describe his feelings, often replacing organs with feelings and things involved in his life.
The narrator often repeats the line "I know this because Tyler knows this." This is used to foreshadow the novel's major plot twist in which Tyler is revealed to be the same person as the narrator.
Another foreshadowing is in the subtle metaphor of one of Tyler's night jobs. He works as a projectionist in an old run-down movie theater and vividly describes how it is necessary for him to change the reels halfway through the film (a "changeover") with no one in the cinema realizing this has happened. This foreshadows how when the narrator falls asleep, he makes a "changeover" to Tyler's persona, with no one realizing the two are distinct from each other.
The color cornflower blue first appears as the color of an icon on the narrator's boss's computer. Later, it is mentioned that his boss has eyes of the same color. These mentions of the color are the first of many uses of cornflower blue in Palahniuk's books, which all feature the color at some point in the text.
The theme of masculinity is also a motif throughout the book. Different symbols lead to this recurring theme, such as violence, and testes. Fighting is perceived as a masculine characteristic.
Isolationism, specifically directed towards material items and possessions, is a common theme throughout the novel. Tyler acts as the major catalyst behind the destruction of our vanities, which he claims is the path to finding our inner-selves. "I’m breaking my attachment to physical power and possessions,” Tyler whispered,“ because only through destroying myself can I discover the greater power of my spirit.”
Additionally, much of the novel comments on how many men in modern society have found dissatisfaction with the state of masculinity as it currently exists. The characters of the novel lament the fact that many of them were raised by their mothers because their fathers either abandoned their family or divorced their mothers. As a result, they see themselves as being "a generation of men raised by women," being without a male role model in their lives to help shape their masculinity. This ties in with the anti-consumer culture theme, as the men in the novel see their "IKEA nesting instinct" as resulting from the feminization of men in a matriarchal culture.
Maryville University of St. Louis professor Jesse Kavadlo, in an issue of the literary journal Stirrings Still, claimed that the narrator's opposition to emasculation is a form of projection, and that the problem that he fights is himself. He also claims that Palahniuk uses existentialism in the novel to conceal subtexts of feminism and romance in order to convey these concepts in a novel that is mainly aimed at a male audience.
Palahniuk himself gives a much simpler assertion about the theme of the novel, stating "all my books are about a lonely person looking for some way to connect with other people."
Paul Kennett claims that, because the narrator's fights with Tyler are fights with himself, and because he fights himself in front of his boss at the hotel, the narrator is using the fights as a way of asserting himself as his own boss. He argues that these fights are a representation of the struggle of the proletarian at the hands of a higher capitalist power, and by asserting himself as capable of having the same power he thus becomes his own master. Later, when fight club is formed, the participants are all dressed and groomed similarly, thus allowing them to symbolically fight themselves at the club and gain the same power.
Afterwards, Kennett says, Tyler becomes nostalgic for the patriarchical power controlling him, and creates Project Mayhem to achieve this. Through this proto-fascist power structure, the narrator seeks to learn "what, or rather, who, he might have been under a firm patriarchy." Through his position as leader of Project Mayhem, Tyler uses his power to become a "God/Father" to the "space monkeys", who are the other members of Project Mayhem (although by the end of the novel his words hold more power than he does, as is evident in the space monkeys' threat to castrate the narrator when he contradicts Tyler's rule). According to Kennett, this creates a paradox in that Tyler pushes the idea that men who wish to be free from a controlling father-figure are only self-actualized once they have children and become a father themselves. This new structure is, however, ended by the narrator's elimination of Tyler, allowing him to decide for himself how to determine his freedom.
In addition, the following editions of the novel were used as references for this article:
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