Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club

In Chuck Palahniuk’s novel Fight Club the narrator struggles with how to cope with his personal problems. The unnamed narrator attends these weekly sessions for ailments he does not have because he finds relief there. Although the narrator may not be inflicted with any physical ailments, he deals with mental illness, guilt, loneliness, and insomnia on a daily basis. In order to sleep, he went to the doctor in hopes of gaining some medical solutions. As he experiences severe sleep deprivation, his doctor simply told him to “swing by First Eucharist on a Tuesday night. See the brain parasites. See the degenerative bone diseases. The organic brain dysfunctions. See the cancer patients getting by” if he wished to witness real pain (19). With this

Although attending these sessions does solve his short term problem of falling asleep, it does not help him with long term benefits. Constantly avoiding solving his severe issues has more negative effects in his life. He could have simply went to a support group for insomnia to treat his specific issue rather than pretending to have other ailments. Also, as the narrator does not give his real name at support groups, he loses a sense of a personal identity and, in turn, avoids all aspects concerning himself. The narrator depends on his outlets, like support groups and Fight Club, to avoid his huge issues rather than potentially eliminating them by dealing with them. The narrator is constantly detached from reality from lack of sleep and constant avoidance: “The insomnia distance of everything, you can’t touch anything and nothing can touch you” (21). Once Marla started appearing in his oasis, he could no longer sleep. It is evident that as soon as he is detected as a fake and someone knows he is lying, he is scared of having to potentially deal with reality. The narrator states that the support groups are the one real thing in his life (24). This statement proves how detached he is from solutions because it is not a “real thing” when he has to lie to simply be present there. Even with all the attempts of avoiding his life, the narrator fails to permanently fix his problems by attending these support