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.