Communism In Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club

In his debut novel, Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk succeeds in creating a dark side to a persons everyday world; one in which the Starbucks cashier or the Costco manager who sells you food could be, and probably is ready to break up civilization. The heart of the novel, though has little to do with such grand scheme, instead revolves around one man’s attempt to free himself from the meaningless life he lives in. Thus through the use of class struggle, anti-consumerism, and alienation the author demonstrates the conflict of a individual against himself and his society.

When the reader meets the nameless narrator of Fight Club, the man has a barrel of a gun in his mouth. This is the highest climatic point of the narrators attempt to attain a sense

Cleary the novel accomplishes more, though, than simply presenting a member of the working class rebelling against the capitalist society, instead employing Marxist themes to see the struggle and desire for an ideal self.

Fight Club as a novel seems to fit into the category of the Marxist theory as discussed in the Marxism and Literature(Williams 85) Characterized by the breakdown of capitalism, novels that follow this theory are meant to have an attention to class. In Fight Club in particular the reader gains a sense of agreement between the characters, although it is developed through an unhealthy way of Fight Club. The agreement had been described as a “Forestage of the experience of classlessness”(Markel’s

These other men needed more convincing to have them realize their dissatisfaction with the society. Gajo argues that “free creative being who shape themselves and their world through their activities”(Petrovic 245) achieves a true form of revolution. The “radical negation of the self-attained society and person” accomplished through revolution creates a “truly human community composed of free human beings”(Petrovic 246).

According to Marxist theory the theme of class is explained in economic terms, stating that “the source of class conflict came from the fact that one class owned the means of production, while the other owned nothing but the labor power to be sold to the former as a necessary means of survival”(Day 6). Thus it is possible to imagine the structure of class to be deleted. Fight Club accomplishes this through the narrators disapproval of his current life he leads in which days are only differentiated by the colors of his bosses tie( Palahniuk