Deconstruction Analysis Of Fight Club English Literature Essay

Deconstruction refers to the interpretation of a text not really with the mind of the author’s intent, rather with a subjective approach. The emphasis in this form of reading is never to learn the intended meaning of the author, but rather the subjective interpretation of the reader. Deconstructionism comes in due to the fact that men view things with different perspectives. Chuck Palahniuk in his works evokes numerous instances that the aspect of deconstructionism is brought out. This paper tends to unearth the abstract location of such scenes in the novel. The ideology is that Fight Club is born out of controversy surrounding the two main actors. The fight between these two characters resulted in some form of imitation that bore this ideology.

Fight Club is realistically an anti-society and at the same time an anti-capitalist novel, but it cannot be said to promote violence. We cannot rule out the inevitability of literalist endorsing the novel to be pro-violent and with aim of promoting destruction. However, Fight Club is better characterized as an indictment of how our society creates the preconditions for the type of violence depicted in the novel, but not the glorification of violence.

In the essence, Fight Club is a novel about a man whose whole life is sandwiched between his work and apartment, and for whom the underground fights with and without rules are just an attempt to find at least some a circle of communication. Who would have thought that a table from IKEA can be the best epithet to describe the life of the hero? Like any truly great work, Fight Club is written about people, typical for the current era; and the narrator is surely a hero of our time, who stays anonymous, but shares latent aggressive desires of the contemporary society: to break boss’s nose, blow up the house, etc.

Fight Club at its peak is such a detailed psychological portrait of a young man that is alienated, dissatisfied and confused. This aspect comes in despite the mayhem involved in the unveiling of the novel. The young man passes the message that is dissimilar from the “open your eyes, and don’t snooze through your own life,” from the American beauty. The time for doing what we ought to do in the society is limited, hence no time to waste. This has created a society that is in a hurry to creation of wealth (Rescher, 2007).

Here, it comes to what the story sums up from being a satire, drama, thriller to black comedy. The narrator is sleepwalking through life though he is suffering from insomnia. This state put the narrator in some form of emotional tension. This forces him to attend support group meetings to find some emotional release. These meetings make him to get to know Marla Singer and at first site develop hate towards her. He exclaims “I can’t cry if there’s another faker present!” (Palahniuk, 1996). This hatred that picked up from here has played a great role in bringing up the aspects of deconstructionism into his life.

But the main change occurs in the narrator’s life after his acquaintance with the hooliganing anarchist (or anarchizing hooligan) Tyler Durden, who taught him a simple philosophy: if you are not satisfied with the surrounding society, then forget the laws and live the way you like it, sometimes being in protest against the society by any means. Their interaction results in a fistfight in the parking lot; and the joys of pain get discovered. Instead of leading to a break up, the fight makes the friendship stronger and serves the precondition for the creation of a fight club.

Tyler Durden announces the first rule of the fight club, “you don’t talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club” (Palahniuk, 1996). The novel is controversial in the sense that everyone around is talking of the fight club. The novelist starts with a call to arms against emasculating consumer culture, telling that men’s instincts have been stifled and at the same time diverted to accumulation of more wealth. Tyler says “Things that you own end up owning you” and “We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear”(Palahniuk, 1996), urging the audience to throw away Pottery Barn catalogs and at the same time urges them not to be willing inhabitants of the Starbucks Planet.

Thus, in his Fight Club, Palahniuk (1996) describes the association of people created as an underground organization whose principal objective is the preservation of masculinity. Inner protest against the consumer society makes the book’s characters abandon their traditional way of life and thoughts of “normal” behavior, as well as “norm” as a whole. Project Mayhem is a latent protest of thousands and millions of young people, crushed by the edifice of consumer society, and it becomes non-latent, pouring out of the basements, where the brutal and spectacular battles take place, on the night streets, and thus, a civilization which has enslaved them, should take care of itself.

From this perspective, the novel depicts Fight Club as a generational statement. The current generation is seen as a generation of consumers, feminized men, social isolation and general mechanization, and the Fight Club is fantasizing in the way it brings an improbable uprising against the existing powers (Boon, 2003). While the media and the leaders are always on the forefront of telling us to always know that we are special and that a difference can be made by each of us, Fight Club tells us that all this is just lies. Tyler announces, “You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. We are all part of the same compost pile” (Palahniuk, 1996). This makes the heroes of the novel to plan the release of their protest.

But living outside the laws of the society – it’s not all. They do not watch movies, do not read books, so they want something that stirs the blood and brings the thrill into the life. And banal fight becomes a rescuing method: it’s not a fight for the idea, for someone or against someone. It’s a fight between people who are factually in good relations. But this fighting is the only thing that allows a person to throw off the load of the civilization and awaken the instincts of a real man, beast, and male. And then, complexes, insomnia, painful thoughts and doubts just go away (Boon, 2003).

The hypothesis on the virtue of self destruction is well brought out in the novel. “Nothing is static. Even the Mona Lisa is falling apart. Since fight club, I can wiggle half the teeth in my jaw. Maybe self-improvement isn’t the answer… Maybe self-destruction was the answer” (Palahniuk, 1996). The novel describes self-destruction, denial of self and of consumer society and information waste, showing us that people in the modern society are similar to feces in the intestines – making their senseless cycle before being sent to the cemetery or crematorium, while frantically shaking over their life, as if it is filled with something high and sophisticated.

However, in order to find the deepest meaning of deconstruction by Palahniuk, it is important to remember that the author of the novel is an expert in Buddhism and Hinduism. And for every Hindu, a modern consumer society is just an attribute of the Iron Age, the era of universal moral and spiritual decay. The enlightened desire for destruction and self-destruction is something more than man’s desire to break free from the shackles of philistinism, and thus, the will of Vishnu is just put into Tyler’s mouth: “We must destroy civilization in order to make it into something more decent” (Palahniuk, 1996). Thus, any act of anti-creation approximates the beginning of a new, inspired and enlightened Cycle.

The idea of “purification through destruction” is seen as perhaps the only noble way of a modern man. Palahniuk (1996) writes, “Only after disaster can we be resurrected.” Tyler offers the narrator to get off from a tiger, symbolizing the forces of chaos, in order to become a tiger. Durden clears the way for Kalki, the last avatar of Vishnu, who comes before the end of the world. The members of Fight Club are “only” catalysts – Fenriz in ancient German epic, Kalki in Hinduism, Angels of the Apocalypse in Christianity, etc., approaching the beginning of Satya-Yuga, and therefore, it does not matter that they planned to build on the ruins of this world, it does not matter how their actions affect the lives of other people. The Project Mayhem has only one goal, and it is total destruction of everything that is the part of the decaying materialistic world, this false reality. And, by the way, Tyler Durden is perfectly aware of this, he has no intention of what will come after. This is not his problem and not his way. In Tyler’s words and actions, we can see the Nietzschean philosophy hammer; the barbarous desire to destroy all empty and useless; and Buddha’s enlightenment, which sweeps away and despises everything superfluous.

Tyler Durden is an archetype, which sleeps in our collective unconsciousness until certain time moment. Someone rocked by the stability and comfort of his wretched materialistic world will forever be the amoeba like the narrator. And someone will be lucky enough to awaken his inner “Tyler” from sleep, calling him out of the subconsciousness in order to break the web of this world, embarking on the path of enlightenment. After all, Fight Club is not just a hobby, it’s not just a protest against modern society (which in itself is of no interest and does not deserve any attention, causing revulsion only as a symbol of decay of this reality), but mostly is a Zen, a way to infinity of the race of Gods. In this prism, Tyler says is that in order to become immortal, one has to die first (Palahniuk, 1996).

Indeed, this philosophy is not new, it is at least five thousand years, but Palahniuk managed to elegantly remind us of this in the 20th century by creating the image of the heroes against time, able to inspire even the everyman stuck in samsara. Art reflects and has always reflected the society. The novel points out the frustration roots that cause people to reach for such radical solutions. The radical solutions only come when the pressure is enough to call for some intervention.

Chuck Palahniuk was able to create a truly unique product. Splashing out on its pages everything that his generation has secretly gained, he has become the author of an original literary phenomenon – a repulsive, frightening, and nasty novel has managed to attract hundreds of thousands of readers around the world. The basis for this phenomenon is the fact that the author not only knows what he writes about, but also feels every line of his novel, filling them with emotion, and finally made the book itself live in the conflict, under whose influence Palahniuk was. And that is why this novel is, on the one hand, unpleasant, but on the other – is necessary to the reader; acquaintance with the novel is extremely painful, and at the same time, healing, helping if not to free from internal contradictions, but at least understand their cause, the essence, learn to live together with them.