The Ongoing Theme Of Loneliness In Fight Club

In the Fight Club, it is clear to see that the narrator suffers from loneliness. It’s very clear at the beginning of the book where he only cares about material objects and not people such as his apartment. He becomes tired of living his boring lonely life so he then decides to join a support group in a way so he isn’t lonely all the time. But the thing is is that he is a “Faker” and doesn’t have any problems that they talk about in the support groups he goes too. This new hobby allows him to express himself in a way he’s never done and gets emotional during the meetings. I think the author is trying to show us how loneliness can cause some terrible issues to a person. For example who would blow up there own apartment. Long term loneliness can cause some serious damage to a person well being and the author did a good job at expressing that.

In the Fight Club, everyone involved with the club seems to use pain to feel something because they’re so tired of their life. Let’s use the narrator as an example. In the chapter where he goes to the bar and meets “Tyler”, they end up going outside and Tyler asks the narrator to punch him so he does. Then the narrator wants to give it a try so he gets punched in the face and in that moment he realizes that he likes the feeling of pain. This is seen throughout the book with everyone in fight club feeling the same way about pain, they enjoy it and it makes them happy because they consider death and pain to be more real than the lives they lead outside the fight club. The author seems to be saying that people have dark sides to them and is not always easy to see. The message is that people use pain to escape and feel happy for once but it isn’t the best way.

A good connection with The Fight Club is the movie Cast Away. They both show what the effects of loneliness can do to a person’s mental state. In the movie, Chuck the main character has been lost at sea alone due to a plane crash. A bunch of FedEx packages wash up to the shore of the island Chuck was on and one of the items was a volleyball. That ball was Chuck’s friend for the 4 years he was stranded on the island. He called it Wilson. The book and the movie have a connection because both characters made up a fictional friend due to the loneliness they suffered from but are different in the way that in Cast Away the ball was a real object while in the Fight Club Tyler was a fiction of his own imagination.

Another good connection to the book is a personal connection to me. Back in the summer of 2018 a few other of my buddies and I decided to start a little fight club. We did it only within our friend group of 6. We didn’t do it because we liked the pain but instead we did it because we were just bored and we thought it was a good idea. The difference is that we had rules unlike the real fight club and we wore boxing gloves. We would all hang out at least four times a week over the summer but only fought once a week. It’s a good connection because we literally almost fully replicated the actual fight club and we learned a lot from fighting each other with respect and in a way became closer to one an another.

Fight Club utilizes imagery a lot throughout the novel. The narrator made me visualize much of what he is seeing, sometimes describing how he beat someone up or how someone looked like after he was beaten up. Similarly, imagery is used when the narrator describes how something is made, such as the production of soap or even the creation of explosives such as nitroglycerin. Fight Club paints a picture in almost every scene about what is happening or happened and how it went down. Truly one of the most interesting books I’ve read thanks to the vivid scenes depicted in my head.