3rd Blog

I have finally finished the book and I thought that it was great, even though I totally saw the ending coming thanks to watching the movie. Since we are doing a project on the most important part most of the blog is dedicated to that. However, first we will begin with a summary of the ending.

In the final part the narrator eventually starts to find out that fight club is not just for pleasure and relief but instead is recruiting grounds for Tyler Durden’s Project Mayhem, a cult whose purpose is to cause as much chaos and anarchy as possible. However, the narrator eventually find out what is going on with Project Mayhem and goes to confront Tyler about it, only to learn that he “is” Tyler Durden. Tyler reveals to him that he comes to life every time the narrator is asleep and that he is his supposed “insomnia”.  After hearing this, the narrator tries to commit suicide to stop all the madness that Tyler started, but is unsuccessful and is taken to a metal institutional, where it is revealed that Project Mayhem is still ongoing even without him.

Now finally we will look at the most pivotal. During the course of story the most significant part comes when Tyler burns a kiss on the unnamed narrator hand. This is very important to the novel because it is the point where the narrator submits to Tyler. With this burn/fire Tyler is morphing the narrator into someone he can use. The fire is starting to make the narrator hit rock bottom and in turn making him fearless.It begins by talking about saliva doing two jobs, one to hold the flakes of lye and the second to start the burn because lye only burns when you combine it with water. Then Tyler kisses the narrator on the hand and says this is the greatest moment of your life. Because everything up to now is a story and everything now is a story. The narrator has lived his whole life without meaning or passion and now Tyler is giving him one. Tyler then goes and kisses the narrator and scatters flaks of lye onto the kiss causing the narrator immense amount of pain. Throughout this whole scene has many images and symbol specially that of fire. 

2nd English Blog

I know that this blog is a little late and I am really sorry about that. However, I wanted to read a sufficient amount of the book before I did another blog and I finally feel I accomplished that.

In my last blog I left off with the unnamed character confronting Marla. The book then picks up by, the narrator's condo exploding while he was away on a business trip. The blast has destroyed the apartment and all of the narrator’s luxury designer goods. After the explosion 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." The resulting fight in a bar's parking lot attracts more disenchanted males, and eventually a new support group, the first "Fight Club," is born. Once living together, Tyler and the narrator become inseparable and the narrator even goes as far as to say “they were becoming the same person”. Together they do mischievous things like sabotaging food and making soap out of people’s fat. At the same time, Tyler also 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. The narrator himself notices Tyler and Marla are never seen at the same time and wonders if Tyler and Marla are the same person. As the fight club's membership grows and, unknown to the narrator, spreads to other cities across the country, Tyler begins to use it to spread anti-consumerist and anarchist ideas and recruits its members to participate in increasingly elaborate attacks. This was originally the narrator's idea, with him saying fight club wasn’t giving him much of a thrill anymore and that he “wanted to do something bigger”. Tyler then takes it to the next level and gathers the most devoted fight club members and forms "Project Mayhem," a cult-like organization that trains itself as an army to bring down modern civilization through its random acts of destructions.

Like I mentioned in my last blog I am really picking up on the foreshadowing that is used by the author, especially with the relationship of Tyler and the narrator. I am also starring to notice a theme of a struggle to be free be from control especially possessions. In the book, the narrator is dealing with a meaningless existence, cut off from everyone and everything. He's not in control of himself, his life, his destiny and is totally estranged from his feelings and has no outlet. So at first, he relies on dying people to help him cry. Ultimately, that's not enough, and rage steps in, in the form of Fight Club. Also there is some dark humor that is used in the book by Palahniuk which is a nice addition to the sometimes overwhelming chaos and destruction. Finally, there are moments when the narrator is saying or doing something and then he will just randomly think about these absurd and distracting things such as where he starts mentioning body parts after every other paragraph. I get that this is how a disturbed mind would think but am not clear if there is more to this or not.

English Blog

Even though I haven’t gotten too deep into it, I am really enjoying reading Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I have already watched Fight Club the movie and though this makes some event less suspenseful and surprising, it allows me to pick up on the subtle hints the author left that foreshadowed the ending. The story begins with Tyler holding a gun in the unnamed narrator's mouth, while they stand on top of the one hundred and the ninety story Parker-Morris building. Meanwhile, on the floors below them, members of the Mischief Committee of Project Mayhem are dismantling the corporate offices and throwing office furniture out the windows. The narrator then tells us all the ways to make explosives, and counts down the minutes until the building goes down in flames. The story then switches to the narrator describing his life as well as Tyler’s. He describes Tyler with great detail, such as the places he works for night jobs and the various sabotages he does, like splicing movies with pornographic pictures. However, the true nature of their relationship is still unclear. The narrator also describes himself working for a car company, organizing product recalls on defective models. He is struggling in his everyday life. Trying to find a purpose for it or even some sort of comfort for he is all alone. This dissatisfaction, combined with his frequent business trips across multiple time zones, disturbs him to the point that he suffers from chronic insomnia. At the recommendation of his physician, the narrator goes to a support group for men with testicular cancer to "see what real suffering is like." After finding that crying at these support groups and listening to emotional outpourings from the suffering allows him to sleep at night, he becomes dependent on them. Although he does not really suffer from any of the sicknesses that the other attendants have, he is never caught being a "tourist" until he meets Marla Singer, a woman who also attends support groups. Her presence reflects the narrator's "tourism," and only reminds him that he doesn't belong at the support groups. He begins to hate Marla for keeping him from crying, and therefore from sleeping. After a short confrontation, they begin going to separate support groups in order to avoid meeting again.

Thus far, the story has been quite interesting. It immediately began with the narrator’s life in jeopardy and all this chaos going on around him. Then, it takes you away from the action to build more suspense. However, it does get a little boring later with him over describing some things, such as how a film projector works, which seem quite irrelevant to the story. This story is also told in a first person point of view, which really enhances our understanding of the narrator. By telling the story in first person the author shows us how an insomniac’s mind works. With the narrator always saying “I woke up in…” to demonstrate that because of this insomnia the narrator’s mind is a drift and has theses streams of consciousness. I found this to be really helpful because it only highlighted the distress and struggles of the narrator.

With all that said, I have really enjoyed the book and look forward to reading more.

Seven Rules for Abhi day (fight club style)

1st Rule – You don’t talk about Abhi day.

2nd Rule – You don’t talk about Abhi day.

3rd Rule – Two Abhi days per week.

4th Rule – One Abhi day at a time.

5th Rule – No shoes/ No shirts on Abhi days

6th Rule – Abhi Days goes on as long as they have to.

7th Rule – If this is your first at Abhi day, you have to be the life of the party.