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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Fight Club, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Consumerism, Perfection, and Modernity
Masculinity in Modern Society
Death, Pain, and the “Real”
Rebellion and Sacrifice
Repression and the Unconscious Mind
Summary
Analysis
The Narrator sits at his computer at work and tastes blood in his mouth. Tomorrow is fight club, he thinks. The Narrator’s colleague, Walter, asks the Narrator how he hurt himself, and the Narrator explains that he fell. He thinks, “The first rule of fight club is you don’t talk about fight club.”
The Narrator doubles back to explain what fight club means. The world is full of fight club members—waiters, garbage men, etc. Fight club is a secret group in which members fight each other. During fight club, members become different people—then the fight club concludes, and they go back to their regular lives. Fight club began, the Narrator remembers, when he and Tyler began hitting each other for fun.
Fight club, it would seem, is open to men alone, and it primarily attracts men from lower socioeconomic groups. These men presumably embrace fighting because it’s an escape from their daily lives and dull jobs—it offers a sense of visceral reality and a thrill of danger. Furthermore, fighting seems to be a way to celebrate masculinity (in a way that modern society does not, Palahniuk suggests), which is understood as being in touch with one’s aggressive instincts and physical strength.
Themes
The Narrator used to get angry all the time. He had no outlet for his frustration. Then, he started going to fight club. Self-destruction, he believes, is the answer to his problems.
Fighting is an outlet for pent-up emotions; because the Narrator lives in a highly repressed society, he has a lot of emotions bottled up. Where the rest of society celebrates beautification and vacuous self-improvement, the Narrator just wants to hurt himself.
Themes
The Narrator describes attending a meeting of fight club with Tyler. The members meet underneath a bar, and every week more people show up. Tyler barks the rules of the fight club—“you don’t talk about fight club”—while the Narrator remembers his own father, whom he hasn’t seen since the age of six. Meanwhile, the fighting begins. After going to fight club, the Narrator thinks, watching football on television is like “watching pornography when you could be having great sex.”
Tyler seems to be the leader of the fight club, while the Narrator watches from the sidelines (though this isn’t quite clear—foreshadowing later revelations). Strangely, the Narrator seems to associate Tyler with the Narrator’s own father, suggesting that the Narrator sees Tyler as some sort of role model. The passage also implies that the fight club becomes so popular because of its immediacy and visceral qualities: next to fight club, regular life feels like a lazy daydream.
Themes
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The Narrator has always been confused. When he turned 25, he called his father, long distance, and asked him what he should do with his life. His father didn’t know, but suggested getting married. Another woman, the Narrator thinks, isn’t what he needs. Instead, he and Tyler go to fight club.
The Narrator rejects the traditional “path” in life: get a job, get married, have kids. Instead, the Narrator now has learned to turn to violence and fighting to satisfy his desires. The idea that the Narrator doesn’t need another woman could suggest that he’s rebelling against the feminization of his society with defiantly masculine behavior (brawling)—or else that the fight club (and perhaps the novel as well) is inherently built on some level of misogyny.
Themes
The Narrator flashes back to the night that he and Tyler invented fight club—the night Tyler asked the Narrator to punch him. Neither the Narrator nor Tyler had ever been in a fight before, and Tyler was desperate to feel a punch. The Narrator is at first reluctant to hit Tyler, but eventually he does. Tyler responds by hitting the Narrator. Tyler and the Narrator realize that they enjoy fighting—they keep hitting each other. Afterwards, Tyler tells the Narrator that he was really fighting his father when he hit the Narrator.
The Narrator and Tyler use fighting to get over their “demons” and deep-seated anxieties: Tyler, for example, admits that he’s trying to get back at his father by hitting the Narrator. This suggests that the fight club is designed to fill a “vacuum” in society—it’s designed to appeal to lonely, alienated men who don’t have any real outlet for their anger, frustration, and desire for visceral experience.
Themes
The Narrator flashes forward—fight club has become a popular, secret group, and more people join every week. As Tyler points out at every meeting, the fight club only has new members because someone broke the rules and talked about fight club.
Clearly, there are many, many people who have the same frustrations as the Narrator and Tyler. Paradoxically, though, the fight clubs only become successful and popular because people break the first rule of the fight club—suggesting that its mission is inherently contradictory.
Themes
Back at his job, the Narrator sits through a meeting, and notices Walter. Walter is young and innocent, with a good job and perfect teeth. Walter stares at the Narrator’s ugly, bruised face, and the Narrator leers back, sure that whatever Walter is thinking about now, it isn’t “a meatless painfree potluck.”
The Narrator’s embrace of his own pain and suffering cause pain and discomfort in other people (those who are still blinded by their bland consumerist lifestyle, it’s implied). The Narrator seems to enjoy causing Walter so much anxiety: the Narrator’s ability to accept pain and even hurt himself gives him tremendous power to control and intimidate others.
Themes
